The life of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson

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THE LIFE OF MONSIGNOR
ROBERT HUGH BENSON

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY

RORERT HUGH BENSON
From a photograph in the possession 0/ Bernard Merefield, Esq.

THE LIFE OF MONSIGNOR
ROBERT HUGH BENSON

BY

C. C. MARTINDALE, S.J.

AUTHOR OF "THE GODDESS OF GHOSTS," ETC.

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

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ro HUGH'S MOTHER

I could not even contemplate, dear Mrs. Benson, offering
these pages to anyone but you, not only for the sake of the active
good-will with which you sanctioned the suggestion that I should
write them, and of the help you have all the while so generously
given me, but because when once I had read the letters that
passed between yourself and Hugh, I simply had no choice.
In his life he had your unique affection, profound and per-
manent; all of that life that by God's law he might, he gave
to you : it would be robbing, so to say, the altar, if I kept back,
or offered elsewhere, this biography {diffidently written, believe
me, and blazoning in every paragraph the consciousness of its
inadequacy).

Asking myself, then, how I ought to try to write it, I re-
membered that you once said to him about a more famous
biography :

" There isn't a shadow on the whole portrait, fust imagine
it. I am going to hint gently that even glaciers have shadows,
and very blue and delicious ones too — and to ask for the mention
of a few endearing faults (/ donU believe his were, but I shall
ask all the same)."

And as one long a friend of yours so emphatically reminded
me, '^ II faut respecter le type que Dieu cherche a produire en
nous."

So, while I certainly would never have been able, I most
assuredly have never wished, to write a vie de sacristie, / have

vi ROBERT HUGH BENSON

tried hard to say what I saw, including his faults — though not
as faults {even if so they seemed), but as facts; nor indeed even
to '^endear" him, but to communicate him, to offer him to
anyone who reads this just as he was, in his tremendous effort
to realise in himself that which he believed God wanted him
to be. And to speak for one moment grandiloquently, I have
had to try to treat this " Life " as a psychological study, or not
at all. As mere annals, a list of things done, or as a mere
study of a litterateur s output, it was inconceivable.

And it is my private consolation that you have read, for
yourself, every word of this book, and that you have approved.
It was his practice to read his manuscripts to you ; I could
not do better than to imitate him at least thus far.

To be able to love and venerate one's fellow-man is perhaps
the highest human privilege; to live ivith the beloved and
honoured is an added grace. To you I owe, then, this great
thing, that I have spent at least this year, despite its constant
distractions, in close intimacy with your son, whom, as the
manner of this life is, I saw so little. My affection for him
was established before I began to write; now it is increased,
and the more solidly made firm. To his mother I do not
shrink from making that avowal. You were {of course) certain
that it would be so. Yet you will not despise my assurance
that you were wholly right.

Very sincerely yours,

C. C. MARTINDALE.

Trumans,

fanuary igi6.

INTRODUCTION

When, at the very kind request of Mr. A. C. Benson,
I undertook to write his brother's life, I did so with
the most sincere diffidence ; partly because I doubted
whether a "life" were the proper way of doing homage
to the memory of a man like Robert Hugh Benson, who
never did anything externally massive or officially im-
portant, nor ever held any notable public position, as his
father did, and whose influence, as far as I could judge,
flowed chiefly from his vivid but elusive personality and
magnetism. Memoirs, I felt, like or unlike those which
have appeared, or rapid pen portraits by his intimate
friends, were more suited to convey his varied and fleeting
moods than was a volume.

Further, my acquaintance with Mgr. Benson was re-
latively slight ; of late years his communications had been
reduced to the minimum necessary for intelligibility — thus,
he would forward to me letters he had received, with brief
legends, in his angular hand, black across the writing :
Can you help this man ? — he seems honest; or. Are there any
books on this ? or, Is this nonsense ? Can you send me a
note? So sorry! The topics he inquired about were
mainly theosophical and the like, or dealt with quaint by-
paths of religion.

Again, it seemed to me that any book on Mgr. Benson
which failed to insist primarily on his utterly personal
and interior moods, motives, and attitudes would wholly

viii ROBERT HUGH BENSON

miss the point on every more important occasion calling
for interpretation, and there is a very natural and justified
repugnance in many readers (not to mention the writer)
for curious inquisition into the sanctities of a man's soul,
be he never so " public " in his career.

Then, the only rebuff I encountered when, having
undertaken the writing of this biography, I tried to collect
material, came from one who commented on " this general
conspiracy to present [Mr. R. H. Benson] as a miracle
of genius and of virtue." It was presumed that I would
continue this "elaborate hymn of unmeasured eulogy."
The writer, being "an enemy to wax-busts with pink
cheeks and china blue eyes," declined all assistance. I
was thus reminded that a hymn of hero-worship was un-
doubtedly being asked for by many of Mgr. Benson's
admirers, and I was conscious that I could not supply
even one stanza of what in any case he would so whole-
heartedly have hated. Yet, on the other hand, I observe
that a man of undoubted education is seriously maintaining
that the Jesuits hated Benson and hastened his death
by poison. This notion, entertaining in itself, though
emanating, one would think, from another age, or race, or
planet, none the less suggested that eccentric motives
might be imputed for any less laudatory paragraph I might
feel it my duty to write.

Yet, for the sake of the warm affection and admiration
I have felt for Hugh Benson, the privilege of speaking of
him appeared too great to be refused, nor was it indeed
easy to disregard the offer of Mr. A. C. Benson, to which
the sanction of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster
had been so cordially added.

It has therefore been my effort, after this so egotistic
introduction, to exclude my personal judgments, prefer-

INTRODUCTION ix

ences, and surmises from these pages, and by making an
almost pedantic use of the great quantity of ''documents "
I have been able to use, to state nothing which is not
fully supported by the evidence. In writing the history
of a mind, not just of actions or events, this has not
always been quite easy. Yet, striving to work inwards
from outside, I have not hesitated to accumulate a number
of small details, quite trivial and exterior in themselves,
convinced that in the superficial phenomenon was to be
detected an expression of, or key to, the real man. Nothing
has been asked for out of mere curiosity, nor related from
sheer love of gossip. And indeed, to those who at any rate
knew and loved him, even these trivialities may be dear ;
while to others, again, the echoes of his voice — speaking
things not necessarily important, even, or original — may
bring some portion of the help and consolation it brought,
already long ago. What I have said, I have checked
constantly by submitting it to the opinion of all (I think)
of Monsignor Benson's close associates, and, whenever this
has been possible, by sending it in proof to those who so
kindly had supplied the data for it.

It will be understood that I have believed that no true
homage is paid to a life like Hugh Benson's, by treating it
as if it had been one of achieved perfection from the
outset ; that he never changed, never increased, was a
Saint in his cradle, or grew, even, towards sanctity, without
many a growing pain, much inequality of development,
much momentary loss of interior equilibrium. A man's
very faults are not so discreditable as the good use he may
make of them is honourable ; and self-development always
implies self-conquest.

Finally, while I have most earnestly hoped not to
wound the feelings of anyone, Catholic or non-Catholic,

X ROBERT HUGH BENSON

of what avail is it to forget that he was, on the one side,
a Catholic priest, passionately eager to spread Roman
Catholicism and fiercely antagonistic to alien creeds, even
when tenderly devoted to many who might hold them ;
on the other, that he was unlike, and knew himself to
be unlike, and wanted to be unlike, a type of Catholic
priest which is by many held to be so general, so delibe-
rately produced, as alone to be satisfactory? In all cases
I have hoped to be purely objective : it has been my
business not to preach, nor to edify, but to relate ; and
even when the subject of the narration is a mood, an
emotion, a spiritual phase, not adequately expressible
in any written document, I have honestly hoped that I
might not first put into him what I afterwards dis-
cover in him, but that I might quite simply tell as much
of the truth as I saw. May so much of apologia be par-
doned me.

I would first thank most sincerely the unselfish kind-
ness of Mrs. Benson, without whose unique help anything
written on her son must be relatively unavailing ; Mr.
A. C. Benson, for the vivid illumination which not alone
his memoir of Hugh, but his many letters and his con-
versations have continuously shed upon dark places ;
Mr. E. F. Benson, and Miss Tait. Particularly, too, I am
grateful for the genial and communicative hospitality of the
Mirfield Fathers, especially of FF. G. W. Hart and Frere,
to whom also I am indebted for the original of the photo-
graph of Mirfield, facing p. 234.

To these I would add the names of Adeline Duchess
of Bedford ; Mrs. Warre Cornish ; His Grace the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury; Fr. H. M. M. Evans, of St. Joseph's,
Brighton ; Prior MacNabb, O.P. ; Mgr. A. S. Barnes of
Llandaff House ; Viscount Halifax, in whose affection

INTRODUCTION xi

Hugh Benson found so constant a support; and very
many others whose correspondence or hospitality has
been of so much help to me, especially as regards the
earlier part of his life.

The Abbot of Caldey, the Rev. A. Morgan, the Rev. J.
MacMahon, of New York ; the Rev. R. Watt, Mrs. F. Ker-
shaw, Miss E. K. Martin, Miss M. Armstrong, Miss Kyle,
Miss Lyall, Mr. Richard Howden, Mr. G. J. Pippet,i Mr.
B. Merefield, Mr. E. W. Hornung, and the many friends
whose memories are fastened about Hare Street and his
later years, have also been of the most patient and generous
kindness. Especially I wish to thank the many who have
trusted me with his letters, or written to me of the spiritual
direction he gave them. Often their names will appear
here but rarely, or not at all ; perhaps because they have
explicitly wished to remain anonymous, or because their
contributions, which they may recognise, appear in a
continuous context, not actually quoted ; or simply because
I felt, in many cases, that names were best omitted.
Perhaps the most valuable help of any has come from
these.

Certainly to no one of them can these pages appear
anything but jejune and even false, at times. They will
remember how hard a task it is to compress into any book
everything they can know of so many-sided and many-
mooded a man as was Hugh Benson : that much should
not be said in any book ; and that something there is of
incommunicable which they each of them have received,
and neither wish to nor can hand over to the eyes and
criticism of another. Should any of these, then, feel that

* The two drawings of Hare Street Chapel arc by Mr. Pippct ; also the
vignette of the Vernacle, or Volto Santo, upon the title-page. Its robust pathos
and almost harsh simplicity are thoroughly in tone with the emotional preferences
of Hugh Benson.

xii ROBERT HUGH BENSON

this presentment of Hugh, which has striven to be first
objective and then interpretative, has suffered the perhaps
uncapturable spirit to elude it, so that it becomes a parody
rather than a portrait, I trust they will forgive me. In
any case, they will accept my repeated thanks for their
generosity and confidence.

C. C. M.

CONTENTS

DEDICATION .
INTRODUCTION

fAUS

V

Vll

PART I

1871-1903

CHAP.

I. CHILDHOOD

II. AT CLEVEDON AND ETON .

III. AT WREN'S

IV. CAMBRIDGE

V. ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION

VI. AT KEMSING

VII. MIRFIELD, 1898-1903— I

.. n . . .

VIII. CONVERSION— I

II

3
31
60

78
102
126
146
169
199
234

PART II
I 903- I 908

I. IN ROME— I 271

„ n .308

II. AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 35°

xiii

ILLUSTRATIONS

ROBERT HUGH BENSON .... Frontispiece

From a photograph in the possession of Bernard Merefield, Esq.

TREMANS To face page 124

HOUSE OF THE RESURRECTION,

MIRFIELD „ M 234

PART I

NOVEMBER 18, 1871— SEPTEMBER 11, 1903

Nondutn amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem,

amans amare.

St. Augustine, Confessions.

ROBERT HUGH BENSON

CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD, 1871-1882

The river, on from mill to mill,

Flows past our childhood's garden still

Below the yew — it still is there —

Our phantom voices haunt the air

As we were still at play,

And I can hear them call and say :

" How far is it to Babylon ? "

Ah, far enough, my dear,

Far, far enough from here —

Yet you have farther gone.

' R. L. Stevenson.

Robert Hugh Benson was the son of a father "for
whom " (his eldest son has written) " the day was never long
enough," while " even at night he lived in fiery and fantastic
dreams " : his mother belonged to that brilliant Sidgwick
clan in which Sir Francis Galton found "the most re-
markable case of kindred aptitude that had ever come
under his notice." Moreover, the Archbishop and his wife
had in Christopher Benson a common ancestor, and were
in fact second cousins. Thus, through this marriage,
qualities remarkable enough in themselves were reinforced
or duplicated, and issued, in the children of such parents,
into that confraternity of talent which is known.^

^ Or rather, not fully known perhaps to those who have not heard of the
extraordinary and precocious intelligence and spirituality of Martin, the Arch-
bishop's eldest son, who died while still at Winchester ; or who have not read
the subtle and fascinating studies of Miss Margaret Benson, his second daughter.
Dare I say that she has seen even farther into " the soul of a cat " than did
the author of The Necromancers?

. 3

4 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

The Bensons descend from a sound stock of Yorkshire
yeomanry into which a strain of inventiveness and shrewd
business qualities had of recent generations been infused.
The Sidgwicks were rich mill-owners of Skipton ; and
Stonegappe, in the moors, and Skipton Castle, where they
lived in the winter, gave Edward White Benson, who was
born in 1829, visions of a social life wider than that which
his own home afforded. Yet, strangely, that temperament
of artist and aristocrat, which was to reveal itself as his,
seems wholly uninherited. From the outset the boy was
ardent, assimilative, and creative. He was given lesson-
books ; but the multitude of other books distracted him ; he
read them all and talked incessantly, being in restless need
to expand and communicate himself. "Just let me read
you this," he would exclaim ; " it is only a little bit of
Southey. I shall get it off my mind and really be able to
work then." Then followed his views on literature in
general. At this time he was about ten years old. He led,
too, a mystical life of his own, and had an oratory with
cross and prie-dieu and decorative brass-rubbings. Here
he recited the Canonical Hours, alone or with boy friends,
and devised traps for audacious sisters who might invade
his privacy. At eleven he went to King Edward's Grammar
School at Birmingham, and prospered intellectually, and
felt the first stirrings of ambition, and made romantic
friendships diversified by explosive quarrels, though certain
notable affections survived for life — for VVestcott and
Lightfoot, for example ; and here too he met Edward I.
Purbrick,^ a future Provincial of the Jesuits. At fourteen

^ He visited Fr. Purbrick in 1872 at Stonyhurst. Each had prayed daily for
the other, they discovered. Benson has left a sympathetic but inaccurate account
of Fr. Purbrick's Mass, and dwells tenderly upon his friend's "wonderfully
delicate, self-governed look" and his "quiet dignity of self-possession." Fr.
Purbrick was indeed one of the world's few men who may be called imperial ;

CHILDHOOD, 1871-1882 5

he is devouring the "Tracts for the Times," justifying
himself by the thought that his father (who died in 1843)
would have wished him to know " what was going on in
the Church." Already indicated, by a judge of character,
as "a born courtier," though too eager in manner, per-
haps, to make that a really good description, he is none
the less definitely touched by grace ; he loves liturgy and
church architecture, and has for ideal " to be a Canon and
recite the Daily Offices in my Cathedral ; " and he forms
a small and secret " Society for Holy Living." Best of all,
he is fired by his head-master, Mr. Prince Lee, afterwards
Bishop of Manchester, with a passionate and personal
devotion to our Lord.^

In 1848 he passes to Trinity College, Cambridge, where
he practises rigid economy, eschews all recreation except
bathing, forms gradually his always rather complex style,
and allows his mind to pursue its favourite processes of
curious observation and collection of detail. He founds
a "Ghost Society," a forerunner of the " Psychical Society,"
and notes, sometimes at great length, those wild but most

his width of view was vast, his mastery of detail miraculous, and neither quality
injured the other. He retained to the end his fresh youthfulness of soul, and
his inner life was profoundly spiritual. Fr. Purbrick later on visited his old
friend, then Archbishop, at Lambeth Palace.

^ He reverenced Lee profoundly ; and undoubtedly this saintly scholar did
much to stimulate yet further Edward Benson's alert imagination in classical
and ecclesiastical departments alike. His memory was vivid and compre-
hensive, but (for his artistic temperament betrayed him) inaccurate, and his
historical knowledge was constructive, but subject to abrupt collapses. It is
interesting to find that as a boy he met Catholicism in the person of Newman,
preaching in his Oratory. The boy is spell-bound by his " Angel eloquence " ;
shudders at the " terrible lines " and " craft " seated on Newman's countenance —
'* Oh, Lightfoot, never you turn Romanist if you are to have a face like that ! " —
watches him singing the Litany of Loretto, and marks his relative apathy during
the invocation of " most of the saints " (none of which exist is that Litany), and
his impassioned fervour as he utters certain titles of our Lady, a number of which
the young critic quotes, but no single one of them accurately, though proffering
them as arguments against Madonna worship.

6 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

coherent dreams which were always to illuminate his
nights. During this time his mother and a favourite
sister died, and much responsibility descended on his
shoulders. He went, in 1852, as assistant master to
Rugby, where the Sidgwicks were installed, among them
being the child on whom his tenacious affections had
already fastened. His relations with his pupils, though
he refused a House, were intimate : with bathing, his
exercise now is to ride, and he will transmit, in part, his
keen love of horses, and wholly his passion for the water,
to his youngest son. He travels, and is presented to Pio
Nono. The mystery of St. Peter's, for a moment, holds
him spellbound. The Pope passed by, towards the
Tomb : round the dome above it thundered the " awful
legend " Tu ES Petrus : " one felt for a moment as
if they really must be the historical chain that bound
the earth to the shore of the Sea of Galilee, as if this
were the mountain of the Lord's House exalted on the
top of the hills.'-' The impression passed. Elected Fellow
of Trinity and ordained priest, he received from the
Prince Consort, in 1858, the offer of the headmastership
at the newly-created Wellington College. He accepted
it, and entered upon his arduous task in 1859, having
married Miss Mary Sidgwick the year before. She ac-
companied him to Wellington, a "sedate matron of
eighteen," and all his life remained a strength and re-
freshment to her husband.

At Wellington he first revealed that astounding power
of organisation, which survives in the mind of many,
who knew him best in his work, as his predominant
characteristic. Physically he was cast in an impressive
mould : largeness and power marked all his action. The
representatives of the Iron Duke's family felt disgust when

CHILDHOOD, 1 871-1882 7

the moneys, subscribed in memoriam, which they had hoped
to see spent upon "fine monuments" set up in "every
considerable town " of England, were " lumped together "
for the building of a "charity school for scrubby little
orphans " ; Dr. Benson made it, single-handed, into one
of the first Public Schools of England. His masterfulness
first expressed itself in the tremendous discipline he ex-
acted : awe, not love, was what he at first provoked. He
had no idea as yet of his " extreme personal ascendancy,"
or of how his displeasure or gloom could depress his
entire environment. His anger still was terrible ; his
exactions at all times severe ; he was an exhausting travel-
ling companion, so would he tear the heart out of all
he saw — and he saw everything— and expect an attention
and appreciation no less vigorous from his tired family.
One result of this high tension at which he lived and
kept others, was a recurrent melancholy better described
as " black fierce misery," a mood bound to alternate with
his enthusiasm. " We laughed," writes the late Dr. A. W.
Verrall, in a memoir of characteristic subtlety and insight,
" at his rosy ideals, and his astounding power of believing
and asserting that they were on the point of realisation,
nay, actually were and had been realised. . . . He could
not, I believe, give an uncoloiired picture of any society
in which he was vitally interested — that is to say, of any
society whatever ! " This passionate interest in life, this
enthusiasm with its alternating mood, this constructive
and reconstructive imagination, with its necessary diver-
gences from the accurate, he was to transmit almost
undiluted to his son Hugh. So too his unique appreciation
and management of the spectacular, and his ingenious
love of an art so recondite in detail as to border upon
mystification. Every minutest point in the decoration of

a ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Wellington College Chapel, in sculpture and glass, was
planned by him and charged with '' conceits " and subtle-
ties which all but defy deciphering.

He planned the Master's Lodge, however, and its
garden in 1865, at a moment when mid- Victorian
scholastic architecture was uttering its loudest, if not its
last, word in hideousness. We read of pitch-pine fittings
and of light lilac washes ; and we see walls of patterned
brick, and stone-faced Gothic windows, and lakes of
gravel, and chill evergreens.

Here Hugh was born on 18th November 1871, in the
big room facing, on the one side, the south front of the
College, on the other, looking over rolling heather, to
Ambarrow with its ancient crowning firs.^

The christening took place at Sandhurst Parish
Church. The baby was called Robert, a family name,
and Hugh, having been born on the morrow of the feast
of St. Hugh of Lincoln. During the ceremony he pro-
tested loudly and shocked his brothers. But there is
no history to be made public about babies. . . . Robin,
as he was at first called, succeeded at least in showing
that he was "then, and always, perfectly clear what
his wishes were, and equally clear that they were worth
attending to and carrying out."

Dr. Benson was a prebendary of Lincoln, and his
old friend Bishop Wordsworth made him Canon and
Chancellor there in 1872. To Lincoln then the family
migrated in that year. If, in the railway carriage, as he
travelled down, the small boy insisted on spending the long
journey at the window, " making remarks on everything,"

^ In fact, when in 1892 he revisited Wellington, they all but defied his own.
^ Dr. Benson was devoted to this view. " Who am I," he often exclaimed,
" that I should be able to look at that every morning ? "

CHILDHOOD, 1871-1882 9

one may not too fantastically surmise that the exquisite
Lincoln Chancery sank deep into the accessible sub-
consciousness of this child. This was the house which
remained his permanent ideal. Tudor red-brick, with
oriel windows ; oak doors studded with the bullets of the
Commonwealth; panelling; winding stairs in drawing-
rooms, " with pentacles on the steps to ward off devils " ; a
ghost unexorcised ; a schoolroom once the chapel. Soon
the windows glowed with coat-armoured glass : in a tiny
oratory Morning Prayer and a simplified Compline will be
recited, and, on Wednesday and Friday, a Litany trans-
lated from the Greek. An ancient garden spread between
walls luscious with peach and apricot and ablaze with
wallflower. Towers rose at its corners, part of the old
town fortifications. In the grey city a vision of Castle
and Cathedral floated, an eternal witness above "the
streaming smoke of myriad chimneys."

Within this romantic paradise, where so easily just
clerical decorum might have reigned, the Chancellor
found himself busier even than at Wellington. At once
he organises and indeed creates. A Theological College
is opened ; night schools for men and boys are started.
The men pour roughly in ; in a moment, the Chancellor
has them in hand, sorted and obedient. He explains the
Bible to them, and thinks "with a workman's mind." His
influence is paramount in Lincoln ; yet his thoughts
range wide, to the colonies and the English Church as
a whole, destined to be his master vision. Meanwhile
he studies; he writes at Cyprian; undertakes the epistles
to the Philippians and the Thessalonians for the Speaker's
Commentary ; lectures on Alfred the Great, studying up
the subject ab ovo ; he preaches his "residence " sermons,
and is a "chief missioner " in a Lenten Mission, and to

lo ROBERT HUGH BENSON

the Chancellor's School he lectures thrice a week. « Can
/ really do any more ? " he asks ; and, though tempted,
refuses the Hulsean professorship at Cambridge. He
has been " perfectly happy in placing the Sweet Mother
in her niche. . . . Beata Maria Lincolniensis is my
patroness."

He refused, too, the offer of the bishopric of Calcutta,
foreseeing that he could not provide in India for the
religious education of his six children, which he felt to
be the foremost charge entrusted to him. "re/ci/a ^x^w
Tnard is a Pauline note of a Bishop," he wrote ; and of
him Canon Crowfoot said : " Nothing struck me so much
as the intense reverence which, as a father, he felt for
his children. He spoke sometimes with awe and tremb-
ling, lest his own strong will and that stubborn temper,
with which his own life was one perpetual struggle,
should do some wrong to them." And the outlook
appalled him. "Religious education," he wrote in 1876
to Lightfoot, " is indeed a difficulty such as had no exist-
ence when we were lads. It is plain enough to see the
difference between worldliness and ambition, but un-
belief now wears a chasuble — I mean a vestment on
which the word 'religion' is joyously worn. And unbe-
lievers pretend that no one is religious except non-
Christians."

At four or five, childhood's impressions can be ex-
ceptionally keen, if only because they omit so much :
in an artistic temperament they will be numerous and
rich, and lay up a multi-coloured treasure of memories.
I have no sort of doubt but that Lincoln, with its ancient
gardens and Tudor halls and the Cathedral towers dim
above the smoke, was responsible for many of Hugh's
imaginative tendencies. All his life he was to live in

CHILDHOOD, 1871-1882 II

a romantic environment, save quite at its beginning.
Romance clings imperishably, I know, to every brick
and stone of a big boys' school, but it must have fainted
quickly upon the lilac walls and pitch pine of the Master's
Lodge, and, anyhow, Hugh never got his really first im-
pressions there.

Few tales survive from Lincoln. Is it childish, in a
biographer, to find these few significant, or at least, in
a sense, symbolical ?

An old colleague of Dr. Benson's from Wellington
came to the Chancery and presented Hugh with a Bible.
After lunch, Hugh, pathetic in black velvet and haloed
with flaxen hair brushed until it shone, appeared at the
drawing-room door, Bible in his arms. "Tha-a-ank you,
Godpapa, for this beautiful Bible ! Will you read me some
of it ? " he asked, qualifying, one might have thought, for
membership in the " Fairchild Family." ^ " And what,"
Mr. Penny asked, " shall I read about ? " as Mrs. Benson,
his companion in the drawing-room, retired awestruck.
" The De-e-vil ! " said Hugh without the slightest hesita-
tion. Mrs. Benson returned.

He ''cherished a tender devotion," as they say,
"towards his glorious patron, St. Hugh of Lincoln," and,
with a child's appropriativeness, recognised him in the
most casual ornaments which might represent old men.
That the emblematic swan was absent troubled him not at
all. He merely inquired "what his Goose was doing ? " ^

Finally, this extremely imaginative and nervous boy

^ Does anyone now remember this book, which made the terror and edification
of Victorian generations ?

^ The Chancellor, who relates this, begins, "Hugh distinguished himself ai
usual . . ." Evidently at these luncheon parties with old friends, to which
all the children went, Hugh could be trusted for some quaintness of remark.
We regret that no compilation of these earlier rneniorabilia was made.

12 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

could never be induced to enter a dark room alone.
"What," he was asked, "do you expect to happen to
you ? " " To fall," he replied between a stammer and a
shudder, " over a mangled corpse, squish ! into a pool
of blood ! "

Devils, saints, and horrors. Perhaps, in his life, these
motifs, with others, will to the end not unequally be
mingled.

A photograph of Hugh at this period survives. The
attitude — the slightly forward, slightly slanted, intense set
of the head — the eyes and the mouth, seem to me ridicu-
lously like those of the older Hugh. The nose, of course,
is unformed, and the head rounder and the hair finer.
Beside him is his old nurse Beth, unduly austere, I
imagine, in her heavy Victorian dress and cap, and with
the shadows of the mouth over-accentuated by the
photograph. But her eyes are wonderful, and their
serene loving beauty tempers the sheer strength of the
nose and chin.

The name of this beloved nurse will often recur in
these pages. She belonged to the inmost of the family
which she served from girlhood to extreme old age. She
had been nursemaid to Mrs. Benson's mother, and nursed
her brother, Mr. William Sidgwick, through an attack of
smallpox, which she caught herself. She went with Mrs.
Benson to Wellington, and Hugh was always her favourite
child. He was not to prove ungrateful.

In 1876 the arrangements for carving a new diocese
out of the unwieldy territory of Exeter were completed,
and in the winter a Bishop was required for Truro. The
charge was offered to the Chancellor of Lincoln. ^ He

* In his biography is quoted in full the characteristic and affectionate letter he
wrote to Fr. Purbrick on this occasion.

CHILDHOOD, 1 871-1882 13

reluctantly accepted it, fearing the tradition that York-
shiremen and Cornishmen could never fuse ; and in 1877
left Lincoln with a heavy heart.^

For Palace, the new Bishop acquired the Vicarage
of a large parish, Kenwyn. At once his forceful hands
remodelled it, building two wings, converting stables into
kitchens, and kitchens into a chapel, and adding a library.
So, too, his ingenious fancy rechristened it Lis Escop,
Cornish for Bishop's Court. In this world of grim
and granite scenery and soft air where camellias and
hydrangeas luxuriated, romance raised once more her
insistent crest. The Bishop's fancy played delightedly
through these villages of mysterious and ancient saints'
names — la, Carantoc, and Uny ; and again, Halzephron,
Lanteglos, Perranuthnoe, Perranzabuloe ; and revelled in
these venerable traditions and incredible anecdotes, as
of the vicar's sister who read the lessons in the church,
in a deep bass voice ; of the nervous and fugitive curate,
who had to be chained to the altar rails during service
lest, at the responses, he should dart from the church —
the churchwarden holding the padlock-key. The Bishop
expanded and inhaled a new air of enthusiasm and " un-
conventional holiness " — he gained, as they say, the
" accent of holiness," and was recognised by the Cornish
as a "converted man." But with this picturesque piety
and curious research into antiquity and local lore went
always the passion for construction — purely ecclesiastical

' " Is this Truro? " Hugh exclaimed at the first station where the train stopped
after Lincoln. But I gather he forthwith succumbed to that train sickness which
for years was to harass him. Once his mother took him abroad. The crossing
was painful : in the train he refused lunch, saying that the very mention of food
made him feel sick. " Sit at the far end of the carriage and shut your eyes,"
his mother said, " while I eat mine : " no ; the very sound of crumpled paper
made him feel ill : then, the bare idea that there was food in the carriage. . . .
His mother had to disembark at the first stop and bolt her food on the platform.

14 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

construction, it is emphasized, uninterrupted by social claims
or politics. "The one lesson," he declared at the first
Truro Diocesan Conference, " which sentiment teaches
us is to be practical ; and the voice of the past is, ' Organise
the present.' " He had especially to face the " rousing "
of his people "into tranquillity." The Church was in-
different ; the local religion passed from a drugged apathy
into a frenzy of revivals followed by pathological reactions.
The Bishop studied, sympathised, conquered hearts,
developed a human influence nothing short of extra-
ordinary. "Cornwall," he used to say, "was the only
place where a conversation with any man, woman, or child
whom you might meet, in the loneliest corners of the
promontory, was always stimulating, never disappointing."
He still paid for his hours of fire and exaltation by moods
of black depression ; and the death of his eldest and most
brilliant son, Martin, at Winchester, in 1878, utterly
prostrated him.

Meanwhile his children's education proceeded, and
I shall be forgiven if I quote more pages than one from
Mr. A. C. Benson's Hugh. I can add little to them, and
their affectionate humour would be lost in condensation.

"At Truro he becomes a much more definite figure
in my recollections. He was a delicately made, light-
haired, blue-eyed child, looking rather angelic in a
velvet suit, and with small, neat feet, of which he was
supposed to be unduly aware. He had at that time all
sorts of odd tricks, winkings and twitchings ; and one
very aggravating habit, in walking, of putting his feet
together suddenly, stopping and looking down at them,
while he muttered to himself the mystic formula,
* Knuck, Nunks.' ^ But one thing about him was very
distinct indeed, that he was entirely impervious to the

^ When at Eton he had a habit of walking with a certain shuffle, for which he
acutely disliked being criticised.

CHILDHOOD, 1871-1882 15

public opinion of the nursery, and could neither be
ridiculed nor cajoled out of continuing to do anything
he chose to do. He did not care the least what was
said, nor had he any morbid fears, as I certainly had as
a child, of being disliked or mocked at. He went his
own way, knew what he wanted to do, and did it.

" My recollections of him are mainly of his extreme
love of argument and the adroitness with which he con-
ducted it. He did not intend to be put upon as the
youngest, and it was supposed that if he was ever told
to do anything, he always replied : ' Why shouldn't
Fred ? ' He invented an ingenious device which he
once, and once only, practised with success, of goading
my brother Fred by petty shafts of domestic insult into
pursuing him, bent on vengeance. Hugh had pre-
pared some small pieces of folded paper with a view
to this contingency, and as Fred gave chase, Hugh
flung two of his papers on the ground, being sure that
Fred would stop to examine them. The ruse was quite
successful, and while Fred was opening the papers,
Hugh sought sanctuary in the nursery. Sometimes my
sisters were deputed to do a lesson with him. My elder
sister Nelly had a motherly instinct, and enjoyed a
small responsibility. She would explain a rule of
arithmetic to Hugh. He would assume an expression
of despair : ' I don't understand a word of it — you go
so quick.' Then it would be explained again : ' Now
do you understand ? ' 'Of course I understand that.'
' Very well, do a sum.' The sum would begin : ' Oh
don't push me — don't come so near — I don't like having
my face blown on.' Presently my sister with angelic
patience would show him a mistake. 'Oh, don't inter-
fere — you make it all mixed up in my head.' Then he
would be let alone for a little. Then he would put the
slate down with an expression of despair and resigna-
tion ; if my sister took no notice he would say : ' I
thought Mamma told you to help me in my sums ?
How can I understand without having it explained to
me ? ' It was impossible to get the last word ; indeed he
used to give my sister Maggie when she taught him what
he called 'Temper tickets,' at the end of the lesson;
and on one occasion, when he was to repeat a Sunday
collect to her, he was at last reported to my mother,
as being wholly intractable. This was deeply resented ;

1 6 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

and after my sister had gone to bed, a small piece of
paper was pushed in beneath her door, on which was
written : * The most unhappiest Sunday I ever spent in
my life. Whose fault ? '

"Again, when Maggie had found him extremely cross
and tiresome one morning in the lessons she was
taking, she discovered, when Hugh at last escaped, a
piece of paper on the schoolroom table, on which he
had written :

"' Passionate Magey

Toodle Ha ! Ha !

The old gose.' *

"There was another story of how he was asked to
write out a list of the things he wanted, with a view
to a birthday that was coming. The list ended :

" * A little compenshion goat, and
A tiny-winy train, and
A nice little pen.'

" The diminutives were evidently intended to give
the requirements a modest air. As for ' compenshion,'
he had asked what some nursery animal was made of,
a fracture having displayed a sort of tough fibrous
plaster. He was told that it was made of ' a composi-
tion.'

" We used to play many rhyming games at that time ;
and Hugh at the age of eight wrote a poem about a
swarm of gnats dancing in the sun, which ended :

" ' And when they see their comrades laid
In thousands round the garden glade,
They know they were not really made
To live for evermore.'

In one of these games, each player wrote a question
which was to be answered by some other player in a
poem ; Hugh, who had been talked to about the
necessity of overcoming some besetting sin in Lent,
wrote with perfect good faith as his question, 'What
is your sin for Lent ? ' "

^ Was this retaliation ? On an old sheet of paper I find the anxious query :
" Am I a gose?" then more boldly, " If I am a gose I'm very silly, and then I
shall not be like a lily . . ." ; finally in triumph, " I'm not a goose . . , which
sets out in the rain which has a great pane when it is being killed."

CHILDHOOD, 1871-1882 17

Besides these more orthodox diversions, it is satis-
factory to know that the brothers and sisters, true to the
immemorial instinct which tempts children, and simple
persons generally, towards secrecy and intrigue, had
formed a mysterious society with " titles, and offices,
and ceremonies " : its Chapters were held in a summer
house, and there were "robes and initiations and a book
of procedure." Hugh was Servitor — a kind of acolyte,
and subscriptions had to be paid, out of which wholly
inadequate salaries were refunded. To the end Hugh
delighted " to talk of the society," though, equally to the
end, it remained unknown for what possible object the
society had existed.^

But his boyhood was not spent in aloofness from his
father. It is true that his mother for the most part taught
him, or his elder sister ; but the Bishop used to take him
for lessons half an hour a day ; a beginning was made of
that pathetic effort to win the boy's full comradeship by
" spudding expeditions," on which Hugh, armed with a
little spud modelled on his father's, worked at the
dandelions on the lawn. Another office, linking father
and son together, became permanent, and was dear to
the heart of both of them. When Archbishop Tait was
to come to lay the foundation-stone of Truro Cathedral,
Hugh, as acolyte, in purple cassock and cap and
surplice, was to bear his train. The Archbishop could
not come, so Hugh attended his father, and afterwards,
with a special mallet and trowel made for him, laid a

^ Neither then nor ever, his brother adds, was he embarrassed by incon-
venient shyness. Personages were to mean little enough to him. The member
for Truro, Sir James MacGarel Hogg, formal, dignified, and white-bearded,
was lunching at Lis Escop, and escorted Hugh's mother to the dining-room.
Secreted there beforehand, Hugh burst out upon the procession with a wild
howl, creating consternation.

I B

1 8 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

stone in the rising walls. At his father's enthronement
at Canterbury he performed the same duty. " I looked
perfectly charming," he said of himself later, " in a little
p-purple cassock and a little p-purple c-cap." ^

On Hugh's tenth birthday, November i8th, 1881, the
private chapel at Lis Escop was opened. The Bishop
wrote to his daughter Mary Eleanor:

Truro, November iSiA, i88i.

My dearest Love and Daughter,— I won't go to
bed when you have seemed to be with us so much
all day without telling you what a delightful opening
of the chapel we have had on Hugh's birthday.

He was so anxious to keep it in that manner that we
postponed it; and the chapel, after all, would not have
been ready if we had not. . . .

Mama will send you a programme. First we prayed,
yet asked for forgiveness and help in what we were
about to do. Then I signed the licence, and Mr. Dickinson
read it aloud. Then, it being by law allowed for the
purpose, we had full choral Evening Prayer. After that
we dedicated the Altar and all its appointments, Hugh
bringing them one by one from the credence and look-
ing so reverent and simple in his purple cassock and
ephod like Samuel. And then I spoke to them all about
the "Decency and order" of the Church of England.
Then prayers for Hugh and for us all.

This cultivated piety might make us nervous for the
fate of its subject. Even his more directly educational
experiences, even his recreations, would (until one knows
Hugh's character, and indeed his father's, better) not
tend to reassure us. The entire family will go for walks ;
botanising proceeds ; Hugh returns asserting that when-

^ This stimulated a taste. The Rev. W. H. G. Jones, to whom he made this
avowal, found him one day in his undergraduate's rooms at Cambridge with a
pile of Japanese garments on the floor. His visitor asked him if he had been
performing to an audience. " No," he answered; "I have just been dressing
up." And on a much more important occasion he wrote : " Monsignor ? the
title isn't worth much ; but the clothes are gorgeous. Peacocks aren't in it."

CHILDHOOD, 1871-1882 19

ever he goes out with the rest he is made to talk about
nothing but poetry and civilisation.

He could enjoy his walks, however. Cornish scenery
is provocative in its varying beauty. His father writes
in his diary of September 2nd, 1882, how he with his
children climbed Roughtor in violent weather :

Tintagel, mystical through rainy films — distant valleys
palely discernible.

And again on September 13th :

One of the most delightful days of my life — by
earliest train to Penzance, breakfasted there, drove to
Logan Rock, to top of which all climbed. Then walked
with them by Tol Pedn Penwith to Land's End. The
beauty and glory of rock, sea, sky, and air, and the dear
enjoyment of these earnest children — as joyous as they are
good — Fred's splendid dash up and down the rocks after
a Clouded Yellow which he secured, and Hugh's endless
similes for every effect.^ The peaceful penetrating delight
of Maggie, and Nellie's capital sketching. The climax
came sitting on Land's End itself, eating pounds of great
grapes. Home by the latest train. All most delightful,
and yet

Quite apart from the "ticketing" tendency this diary
displays (each member of the party was expected to play
up to his special character), which in Hugh was quite
as strong as, and perhaps more precipitate than in his
father, it appears to me to involve an element of very
poignant pathos, and to reveal a divergence not alone
in mode of emotional expression, but in temperamental
construction which might well have foreshadowed a
more profound cleavage of sympathy than was ever, in
fact, destined to come about, between the Bishop and
his children. Having said this, and in view of all I am

^ His gift of unexpected simile remained unaltered. " May's feelings towards
Val went in moods, like layers in a Neapolitan ice" is the sort of thing he
constantly said, and at a moment's notice.

2b ROBERT HUGH BENSON

about to suggest, I wish first to emphasize that whatever
else may or may not be true, this at any rate is most
utterly certain, that this father's love for his children was
not only profound, but passionate, and that he singled out
Hugh as the one on whom he was fain to lavish all that
was most tender and most intimate in that love. " I
always reckoned on this one," he was to write later,
when Hugh decided in 1889 to go in for the Indian
Civil Service, "to be my great friend as I grew old."
That anything should be written or surmised which
might obscure this primary fact of Bishop Benson's
affection for his children, and perhaps for Hugh in
particular, would be a grief to all who love or revere, on
different titles, his memory, and to it, before all further
considerations, homage must be rendered. Later, I hope
to recur to, and insist upon this ever more tender and
mellowed love.

But it was an anxious love : Mr. A. C. Benson speaks
of his father's "almost tremulous sense of parental re-
sponsibility," Here was a man combining the rare
qualities of power and of sensitiveness, of the autocrat,
and the artist, the doer and the dreamer. Great politicians
often achieve their triumphs by shutting off — even at the
seeming expense of justice and truth — every aspect of a
question except one, and then concentrating continuously
the whole force of their personality upon the realisation
of that which they so one-sidedly behold. A many-sided
view often paralyses action. Now for force of personality
Hugh's father was perhaps not easily outpassed. What-
ever he did — and his hand found many things to do — he
did it with his might. Largely built, as I have said,
"leonine," as they call it, in mould of head and firm of
tread, he carried himself throughout life finely, with

CHILDHOOD, 1871-1882 21

fieyaXoTrpivreia, as Aristotle determines it, an undoubted
aristocrat, utterly a prelate, though the gentleness of his
dignity increased to the end. However, he could also,
like an artist, focus and refocus perspectives with extra-
ordinary rapidity and completeness. Accordingly, when
the scenery of his attention altered abruptly from Europe,
or England, or his diocese, to a vicarage or a schoolroom,
and the same torrential flow of personal judgment, enter-
prise, and handling kept on its way, its subjects came
easily enough to feel themselves its victims. Moreover,
he viewed all things, spontaneously, sud specie aeternitatis.
At times, then, he behaved like Browning's Lazarus, who,
having seen the glory to this side and to that of life's
black thread, acted " across," and not " along," the thread.
In trifles at times he would catch <' prodigious imports,
whole results." Although, I confess, the sickening of his
loved child to death " abated " terribly his cheerfulness,
and caused him much "pretermission of the daily craft,"
yet it was true enough of him that "a word, a gesture,
a glance from that same child

" Will startle him to an agony of fear,
Exasperation, just as like."

He brooded ; he ordered the might of his remonstrance
by his changing mood indeed, but also by his uneclipsed
ideal ; he appealed to lofty motives to which onlookers
could see quite well the children were at the moment, or
perhaps always, incapable of responding.

With regard to Hugh in particular this was un-
fortunate. To him he had transmitted, generously, the
artist's temperament and all the vividness of his
personality. Hugh then too had a personality and was
irrevocably an individualist. But where the Bishop

22 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

advanced terrible as an army with banners, Hugh
skirmished ; what the Bishop meant to do, he prepared
elaborately and then did. Hugh, fired by an idea, rushed
at the materialising it, quite without the previous mastery
of the means to this.^

The Bishop was in all that he did relentlessly
purposeful ; nothing in Lis Escop just " happened." He
tended, as I said, to exhaust his family, who might be
excused for wanting a little room just to " play about in,"
a prerogative which Mr. E. F. Benson so generously
allows to his characters. Hugh Benson, even when at
last he learnt to work, did so in fierce bursts of con-
centrated energy which left him sometimes exhausted,
but: often in a delightfully inconsequent humour, in which
conversation bubbled out pell-mell, and the ideal, on the
whole, was that you should for the moment pursue no
ideal save, if you will, that of complete relaxation. His
father never could relax. Even such dissipations which
were officially organised were not always, as I suggested,
of the most exhilarating. The Bishop expected that
his children should enjoy themselves intelligently, and
was worried by the flippant and volatile. He liked being
asked sensible questions, to be suitably answered. Once

^ A charming anecdote relates how, fascinated by the idea of conjuring, he
at once offered to give an exhibition, but he had practised none of his tricks, and
the result was a fiasco. Similarly he prepared a marionette show at Addington,
where puppets dressed by Beth and his sisters were to enact scenes from history,
as, for instance, from the life of Thomas k Becket. The curtain rose : Hugh's
voice was heard declaring: "Scene, an a-arid waste," and next, in a loud,
agitated whisper, " Where is the Archbishop?" But the puppet had been lost,
and from this play of Becket the Archbishop had to be omitted. An invitation
and a ticket to the Bonus Theatre, "owned by" R. H. Benson, still survives.
Admission is free, children half-price. The play, by M. E. Benson, is The Ghost
of Castle Garleigh. The villain is Don Jacopo, uncle of the maiden Andromache,
who inherits Castle Garleigh. Her brothers are named Baldwin and Pedro ;
Camilla is an old hag, accomplice of Jacopo ; the ghost is her father Ramon,
supposed dead, but returning in the nick of time to prevent her murder.

CHILDHOOD, 1871-1882 23

on a Sunday walk he had been explaining the Parable
of the Good Samaritan to Hugh, and then seeing an old
woman toiling uphill with a bag of potatoes, "Go," said
he to Hugh, " and be a Good Samaritan to that old lady."
"But, papa," answered Hugh, playing up like any
Sandford, " I ought to hate her as the Samaritans hated
the Jews." This gave the Bishop his chance of redeeming
the character of the priesthood ; but his effort to help
the old woman was anticipated by " a still more active
Levite" in the person of the curate of Kenwyn, who
had caught him up. . . . These Sunday walks are mentioned
by Hugh Benson in his Confessions with no affectionate
emphasis. They lasted an hour and a half, and were
rather slow and "recollected." One of the children,
or the Bishop, would read aloud, sometimes George
Herbert, whose " peculiar, scholarly, and ingenious medita-
tions " used, Hugh says, to produce in him " occasionally
a sudden thrill of pleasure, but far more commonly a kind
of despairing impatience." But he found satisfaction in
the quaint devices such as wings or altars, in which
Herbert printed his conceits.^

Lives of Saints, felt to be interminable ; volumes of
Church History ; Dean Stanley on the Holy Land, were
also read. St. Perpetua's martyrdom, indeed, captivated
him, and he was awestruck and probably rather depressed
to find that his father had been translating freely and
at sight the certainly not too limpid Latin of her Acta.
Children often feel resentful at the display of their parents'

^ But George Herbert deserved belter than this. His poetry is amply
capable of appealing to childhood ; and Hugh's taste for ingenuity ought, one
would have thought, to have opened for him the gates to Herbert's more inward
charm. Possibly the circumstances of his introduction to the poems spoilt (as
happens in the case of so many authors read as, for instance, class work at school)
his power of enjoying the poems themselves.

24 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

accomplishments, not to mention their virtues. It is so
often implied that if they try hard they will be as good,
one day, themselves. . . .

After the walk came the Greek Testament lesson or
Bible-reading in the study. Hugh recalls the brilliancy
and intellectuality of these functions, but in reality the
children were, here again, not only rather bored, but
distracted by the duty of seeking for their father's display
of emphatic pleasure when they did well, and of avoiding
his "oppressive disappointment" when they were stupid.
Hugh had needed, he felt afterwards, a different machinery
for the shaping of his spiritual life — a great use of pictures,
a minute and constant ritual of fingered beads and crosses
traced — still perhaps not realising the unique halo which
can form itself around the written word of the Gospel
if but the associated memories of its first reading be
intimate and tender. But I must well confess that the
Bishop, whose knowledge was exhaustive, had no notion
how to "leave out." He had the scholar's horror of
ragged edges, or of contents unexplained. The quaint
wanderings of a word-stem through devious paths of
meaning ; the subtle values of tenses and particles ;
notions allied to the word but in no way to the context —
who does not know the fascination which these have for
certain minds, and indeed the curious delight and enrich-
ment of view which may be found in yielding to the spell ?
But this better suits men standing, shall we say, for
scholarships at a University, than the impatient mind of
a Hugh, superficial in the sense that it might have enjoyed
the vivid pictures thrown off by a passage taken as a
whole, but by no means inclined to burrow among roots.
Another time he said he felt like a little china mug being
filled from a waterfall.

CHILDHOOD, 1 871-1882 25

There are some rather hard pages in the Confessions
in which Hugh seeks to describe the religious influence
which his father exercised on his mind. It was so great,
he asserts, that he despairs of describing it. He would
have felt it a "kind of blasphemy," he says, to have held
other opinions than his father's during his lifetime. I
sincerely believe this to be a slightly inaccurate descrip-
tion of his own boy-mind. Certainly, records show that
long before the Archbishop's death, Hugh's mind was
working quite independently, to an extent, indeed, which
made the Archbishop nervous. Moreover, much that was
supremely meaningful to the Bishop — the Presence of God
and its character, the personality of Jesus Christ — was not
apprehended at all, or quite differently, by Hugh. I think
it is true to say that for Hugh to have stated^ even to
himself, views differing from his father's, would have
seemed "a kind of blasphemy." It is the hardest thing
in the world to be quite sure of what one's real self does
believe ; and to a child the expression of a belief is
constantly taken for the vital fact itself. Sometimes one
comes across in a child, at a moment of spiritual unveiling
of which it may itself be quite unconscious, the most
startling exhibitions of interior scepticism ; oftener still,
of active self-delusion. Hugh relates a list of "puzzles"
with which his father's beliefs supplied him — what really
he thought about the binding character of the liturgy ;
of divorce ; of the " Catholic Church," especially of the
Sacrament of Penance. All these are, as conscious prob-
lems, undoubtedly the products of a later age, and not
to be reflected back to the simpler days of Truro.

I think he speaks truly, though, when he says he felt
towards God as towards a present parental authority, and
that in it only the more austere elements of human

26 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

parenthood were to be perceived. It takes long to realise
that it is after the heavenly fatherhood that " all paternity
on earth is named" in pale and partial imagery, and it
may well be that even as a rule God is, by obedient
children, so cast in their human father's image, that He
is not only none too well loved, nor even perhaps " liked,"
but on the whole resented though obeyed. The Person,
too, of Jesus Christ, is, though I fancy less by Catholics
than by those who do not possess the tabernacled Presence,
conceived, as Benson says, in the past or the future, as
the figure whom the Gospels show, tender and miracle-
working, a world away in time and place, the Galilean
who yet is to " come again." Sunday evenings, Benson
has hinted in The Light Invisible, were touched for him
with that glamour which I imagine almost the least wise
of Victorian homes (and the Bensons' was far from being
one of these) knew how to cast about them. Hymns, and
the bells of Evensong, and a certain patriarchal tender-
ness, and a mysterious melancholy as of ending (for no
one ever yet, I am sure, felt Sunday to be the first day
of the week ; it is an interspace, at best ; clearly the
new period starts on Monday morning), go to invest
those hours with an unforgettable sentiment. Also Hugh
recognised that a "strange aroma" cleaved about his
memories of the careful liturgies performed in the tiny
chapel of Lis Escop no less than in the stately oratories
of Lambeth and of Addington. What I think is very
characteristic indeed of Victorian and Anglican education,
is a sort of Stoic equalisation of moral faults under the
superior " formality " of " disobedience." It is recognised
by parents, no doubt, that to climb over wire railings
with one's feet elsewhere than close to the fixed supports,
may damage indeed the wires, but is not morally wrong.

CHILDHOOD, 1871-1882 27

But to do so after being told not to, exalts the offence
into a sin comparable to those of sulks, temper, or mean-
ness. Possibly the parent may not guess that so the
child-conscience feels the thing ; but there is no sort of
doubt that moral issues are thus quite often and quite
gravely and for a long period confused, and a false con-
science formed. Moral lapse, in the circumscribed sense,
is reckoned inconceivable and as " not so much as to be
mentioned among you " ; it is never, therefore, alluded
to, and never (alas, how fatally !) prepared for. Certain
sins are outstandingly abhorrent ; lying, thieving, and the
improbable vice of cruelty. But it was difficult to see
what expression of wrath would be found adequate for
these when "to forget an order, or to disregard it in a
moment of blinding excitement " (a characteristic condi-
tion, by the way), to throw stones at gold-fish or to play
with fingers during prayers provoked all the reprobation
due to grave moral delinquencies.^

It remains that Hugh had plenty of personality for
resistance.

The most remarkable thing about him was a real
independence of character, with an entire disregard of
other people's opinion. What he liked, what he felt,
what he decided, was the important thing to him, and
so long as he could get his way, I do not ithink that he
troubled his head about what other people might think
or wish ; he did not want to earn good opinions, nor
did he care for disapproval or approval ; people, in fact,
were to him at that time just more or less favourable

^ Benson says he was conscious of, and consoled himself by, this fact when
once at Eton he was falsely accused of serious bullying and nearly flogged. " I
was very nearly paralysed in mind," he says, " by the appalling atmosphere ot
my father's indignation, and wholly failed to defend myself by tears of silent
despair." Almost so confused as to doubt his own innocence, he felt that he
had at any rate known the worst of possible anger before, and for trivial faults. —
Confessions^ p. 1 5.

28 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

channels for him to follow his own designs, more or less
stubborn obstacles to his attaining his wishes. He was
not at all a sensitive or shrinking child. He was quite
capable of holding his own, full of spirit and fearless,
though quiet enough, and not in the least interfering,
except when his rights were menaced.^

To sum up this part of the boy's life, spent altogether
at home and apart from all alien influences. He appears
to me already in a sense lonely, not that he was aloof,
uninterested, eremitical, but rather that he was too
interested, too keenly alert to new impressions, too excited
over life, to be able to take in deep feelings — he was the
most unsentimental of children — or at any rate to be
conscious of his deeper feelings. Mr. A. C. Benson re-
marks more than once and with very great acuteness, in
his father's Biography, that the Archbishop, to his reading
of him, was not often conscious of the great happiness
which in reality was his. He was too busy, too pre-
occupied, too ready for the next thing. Something of
this already shows in Hugh. He really was happy at
Truro, though from the Confessions you would never guess
it. But partly he really had not anything very deep, as
yet, within him (and, after all, he was barely eleven !) and
partly he did not know what he in fact possessed (and
again, at eleven one should not be too interiorly aware !).
But one may regret that he did not feel more consciously
his father's love for him, or, feeling it, could not find more
that appealed to him in its expression. Earnestly I wish
to repeat that here is no radical and total schism of
temperaments such as is described in that most terrible
book, Father and Son. The tragedy was subtler, as Hegel
saw Greek tragedy to be. On either side was so much

1 Hugh, p. 37.

CHILDHOOD, 1871-1882 29

good ; on either, such a little that was faulty ! Yet, for
that, the two wills scraped along, if I dare put it so, side
by side, not merely separate, still less springing vehemently
apart, but never quite fusing ; perhaps to the end a mis-
understanding survived between two who should have
been such friends.

And in all this long period of formation, there is one
influence which in these pages of the Confessions^ for
whose seeming hardness we cannot but feel sorry, Hugh
never mentions. Yet it was one which, his whole life
through, kept revealing itself in its results. This was his
mother's ; and already, whether he knew it or not, a force
was dealing with him, as vivid and active as the Bishop's,
though more tacit, less to be appraised or minutely traced
in detail. Her presence was to him both comfort and
consolation — it meant less loneliness and more strength,
it established his individuality, and led him beyond the
limits of a selfish self. " Love best is served by briefest
speech." So, if I allude no more explicitly to this constant
factor in Hugh's life, its existence should never for a
moment be forgotten, nor yet Hugh's ever-increasing
recognition of its existence.

These two heredities and educations, then, formed
Hugh's first years, and I have seemed to find Hugh hitherto
in his father rather than to trace, later on, his father in
Hugh. For whatever of fire and artistic versatility, of
impatience with the data of mere sense, of constructive
appetite reproduced itself in the son, the mould was
indisputably broken ; the vastness of mental grasp, the
massiveness of execution, were not handed down ; and if,
as seems tolerably visible, the conspiring qualities of
these two reunited clans reached to their most brilliant
in the generation of which Hugh was the youngest, they

30 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

were destined, perhaps, to end there, so that in him pre-
cisely the prerogative of genius was most markedly allied,
as so often, with a certain basic weakness ; rapidity, with
a certain impermanence ; and delicacy of perception with
a nervous system from the outset too high-strung.

CHAPTER II
AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1882-1889

" I had made up my mind that it was not pleasant to be an Ishmael, that as
far as possible I would try to be an ordinary boy at my new school. ..." "But
don't be miserable" (he said) "just because you're different. I'm different; it's
a jolly good thing to be different !" — Richard Middleton.

In the May of 1882 Hugh left home for the first time,
an4 since it was very soon after this that his father was
elected to be Archbishop of Canterbury, by Hugh's home
will be meant, henceforward, Lambeth Palace and Adding-
ton Park near Croydon. The red-brick or white-stone
turrets of Lambeth are familiar from the outside to those
few Londoners who care to notice anything on the Surrey
side of the Thames. It was never felt by the Archbishop's
family really to be their home, and appears but seldom,
even as background, in Hugh's novels. Addington was
different, though now it has been sold, and the Arch-
bishops no more live there. Its park is as beautiful as the
house itself was unromantic, having that sober stateliness
in which our nearer ancestors loved to encase rooms of
extreme and substantial comfort. This place, with the
riding which its park made continuously possible, often
finds its way into Hugh's books ; ^ above all, the stateliness
of life in these houses, the cumbrous transportations of
the family from one to another, the heterogeneous but

^ The Archbishop rode slowly, and the horses became rather out of hand.
By the boys, to be his companion in this was felt to be, perhaps, a penance,
and shirked. One horse, in particular, Quentin, threw nearly everyone, Hugh
included, and reappears in his own name, in a significant episode of The Coward.

31

32 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

always important gatherings which they inevitably col-
lected, filled his memory with innumerable details for his
imagination to work upon and his caustic wit to play
with.

About his preparatory school at Walton House, Cleve-
don, in Somerset, he has very little to say. In his Con-
fessions he mentions, of course, only his recollections of
what had touched his religious sense, and these are
connected merely with the moderately high ritual in vogue
there, with a dark sanctuary, fenced off by iron and brass
screen-work, with coloured stoles and depressing Gregorian
chants. As a matter of fact, be the Sanctuary but dark
enough and the screen tolerably glittering, the average
small boy will remain complacently ignorant of what
goes on inside the one and behind the other. He is
content to sing the hymns he likes, to scratch his initials
on the bench or to lick its varnish. Such religious emo-
tions as reach him have to associate themselves somehow
with the notion of home ; they will be entirely unawakened
at both early and mid-morning services, for in that bleak
or brisk or rain-sodden atmosphere nothing of psychic
stirs. Breakfast, anyhow, extinguishes such flickers of
the soul as may respond to the thrilling light of dawn.
But in the evening, the chapel is warm and dusky; the
stained-glass light is solemn, and points of gas-flame
make a glamour where brass or polished stone reflect
them ; favourite hymns, and the august and familiar
phrasing of the Bible, relax interior resistance ; the
sermon, even, may disengage some sentiment. Vague
resolutions form ; promises are distantly recalled. After-
wards, the study of Greek Testament, supper, and the
dismal prospect of Monday repress once more these
spiritual stirrings.

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1882-1889 33

Mr. A. Bevil Browne, who was a new boy at Walton
House with Benson, recalls distinctly Hugh's pale face
and longish hair and unusually thoughtful face.i

Certainly his dramatic imagination was already active.
The boys used to be encouraged to learn Latin grammar
at meal-times, and it is consoling to hear that this
dyspeptic proceeding was alleviated by the stories into
which Hugh used to fit the nouns occurring in the
rhymes by means of which the boys learnt Latin genders.
He was too brilliant; the laughter became uproarious,
and the table was " silenced." Marionette plays became
popular, though I do not find that it was Hugh who
invented them. He and Lord Beauchamp dramatised
Scott's Abbot, in which the escape from Lochleven had
fired Hugh's imagination. Mr. Browne protested that
the sentence, "One, two, three, four chairs, including
the broken one," had not been rendered into verse.
Hugh displayed the obstinacy suited to a poet who is
sure of, but cannot justify, his intuitions. He just said
that he had left it as it was in the book, and would not
budge. So, to a protest that "the sky," which he was
painting for the night-escape scenery, "isn't blue like
that at night," he merely replied, " Oh, isn't it ? " and
proceeded.

Mr. Bevil Browne remembers him as not altogether
happy in his environment, though he had the power of
escaping from it by the doors his imagination opened,
and he never showed " impatience of routine." As a
matter of fact, his inventiveness was concrete : he started

^ In the photograph of the three brothers published in Hugh it is seen that
the long hair was no speciality of the youngest. Hugh wears the somewhat
stunned expression proper to photographs, and is dressed in an Eton suit, not
the "black suit with knickerbockers gathered at the knee, then as unusual as
they are now universal," as Mr. Bevil Browne describes them.

I C

34 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

fashions or feverishly adopted those existing and developed
them. He liked teaching others to do what he could
do — walking on stilts, for instance ; was a bowler, and
nearly in the eleven, and coached his dormitory for
matches which he arranged. ^ Boy-like, he knew no
half-tones : people were " beasts " or heroes. The
reverential faculty showed no further sign of develop-
ment. At Addington, in the holidays, Hugh once sat
with his friend in a cedar and told stories and looked
stealthily down on the heads of a dozen gathered Bishops
and invented a nickname for each.

Mr. A. C. Benson would, I imagine, consider the
colours of this picture too gay, if not idealised quite by
reminiscence. " Hugh often spoke of Clevedon," he
writes to me, " and always in a depressed sort of way."
The town itself was — then, at any rate — sordid, modern,
and straggling ; Wales rose " shadowy across the mud-
stained tide." Hugh disliked the view, and failed really
to fit in with the life of a private school, a place where,
more than in any other, the individualist is bound to
pay. If, indeed, Hugh's memories of Clevedon were
substantially unpleasant, I expect that he really was none
too happy there. At the time, he may quite well not
have known this. A small boy has an extraordinary
power of not knowing whether he is liking his life as
a whole or not. He can pass, at a hint, from gloom
to excited pleasure ; it takes long before a summing up
is possible, and by that time developing personality has
grievously altered the lenses of the mind. But, on the
whole, while the memory tends to omit the unpleasant

^ He is said to have invented a "tutorial system for his class, in which the
top boys were to help the backward." But assuredly the practice of exacting
toll from the superior expert is old enough, and did not require inventing
by Hugh.

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1882-1889 35

and to decorate the past with aureoles, Clevedon
apparently never in his eyes wore a halo. In 1885
he won a scholarship at Eton and went there in Sep-
tember.

A boy's life at a Public School finds many more to
speak of it than his earlier days at some Temple Grove
or Elstree ; perhaps, because the mind of a small boy is
so hidden a thing and so hugely remote from middle-
aged novelists, so inarticulate, and so devoid of the
significant moods of adolescence that it is left alone.
And yet Mr. Kenneth Grahame has briefly but sufficiently
reminded the readers of The Golden Age that it is during
the first term spent at a private school that the real gulf
is cleft between the home-bred child and the boy. A
few brave writers have invaded that twilit consciousness —
Mr. Richard Middleton, for instance, in one or two subtle
studies in The Ghost ShiPy^ but unsurpassably, of course,
Mr. Compton Mackenzie in the first volume of Sinister
Street. But there would be no materials, as has been
seen, even for such architects as these, to construct a
history of Hugh's mind during that fascinating period.
Eton, no doubt, has fired fewer to write of her than has
her more sentimental sister, Harrow ; probably it is part
of the unconscious ideal of the serene College to feel no
need to speak about herself. Yet, it is not Eton, but
still Hugh Benson himself who here defeats us. Eton
never seems to have inspired him much. He never, for
instance, uses his school as the setting of a novel,
" historical " or modern. For a late Reformation story,
the red-brick College and Henry's grey chapel, the old
town, and the castle would have made an incomparable
scene ; and the man who could write so lightly and

^ Thus, in A Drama of Youth and The New Boy.

36 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

suggestively, quite en passant, about a boy still at Eton,
as Benson has in The Coward, could have written delicious
things as a study of more youthful " Conventionalists " in
that life of river and cricket-field and schoolroom and,
above all, of House etiquette and hierarchy. He loved
to diagnose the moods of boyhood and the gusty temper
of adolescence. The solemnity of youth, masking its
timidity ; the charm — almost the sacredness — of cruelly-
named *< calf-loves ; " the elusive religion and the rigid
code of public opinion, were favourite topics for his
thought. Yet of the life of Eton he says scarcely any-
thing — a few hard pages in the Confessions, and three
contemptuous articles in Everyman^ — and of the place
itself, never a word. When, in 1906, Mrs. Warre Cornish,
the wife of the Vice-Provost of Eton, implored him to
take Tudor Eton for a theme, he could not rouse himself
to the slightest response. I frankly believe him to have
lived in Eton, on the whole, impervious to the spirit of
the place, and if this is so, no possible proof could be
more cogent of the triple oak and bronze which his per-
sonality opposed to all that did not suit it. The same
friend reminds me how all his life you might perceive
in him a genuine temperamental detachment from one
part of the impressive, court-like existence of Lambeth and
even Addington, where the atmosphere was heavy with
ecclesiastical and even secular politics, and, indeed, a
certain sense of sovereignty ; and similarly from Eton, where
a code not in the least his own in so many points imposed
itself upon him, he lived half out of sympathy. However,
Mr. Matthew Hill, a contemporary of Hugh at Eton, in

^ These articles created grave annoyance, and elicited protests by no means
wholly playful when his name necessarily came up for invitation to the annual
dinner of Catholic Old Etonians.

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1882-1889 37

order to correct any impression of deliberate aloofness
on Hugh's part, has written :

When we were boys together he was by no means
regardless or unheeding of public opinion. On the
contrary, he was exceptionally anxious not to offend the
conventional standards, or at any rate not to be found
out doing so. He was always careful to know the right
people and do the right thing. His individuality of
character had not in those days asserted itself. Although
much is vague in my own mind as to what happened
nearly thirty years ago, these impressions stand out
clearly enough, and I am convinced of the truth of the
above.

Another clear recollection [Mr. Hill proceeds], is the
delight we used to take in a sort of game wherein we
pretended to be monks. I can clearly see him now coming
into my stall clad in a dressing-gown with some sort of
cowl to it and gliding out again, and myself doing the
same kind of thing, though I feel sure we should not
have liked to have been discovered by our confreres at
such childish proceedings ! I also seem to remember
that he wrote out some kind of story based on our
monkish performances, but I may be wrong about this.
Another kind of scene we used to enact was the offering
of human sacrifices to Huitzilopochtli. He and I were

the officiating priests, while the victim was usually D ,

but I am quite sure that no pain of any kind was inflicted.
I ought perhaps to add that it was I, and not Hugh, who
was the originator of these games. Though we all ragged
one another, Hugh never bullied anyone. He would
always cry " bad luck " if the fun went too far !

He was always quick to note personal eccentricities

and delight in them. Charlie C , one of the servants.

Miss H , and H D , to mention a few, were a

continual joy to him. He was always ready to joke about
people who amused him ; and until his last year, when I
saw less of him, I can hardly picture him except as smiling
or laughing. . . . Not that Hugh was devoid of his own
small mannerisms. I well remember the little shuffle
he used suddenly to make while walking, and the real
annoyance he showed when we imitated him or ragged
him about it. He delighted, as did I, in " gas rags." This

38 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

consisted in turning on a row of gas jets in Chamber.
One side, armed with towels, had to prevent the other
from setting Hght to the gas by means of torches con-
sisting of roUed-up newspapers lit at Chamber fire ! The
smell and mess at the end of the "rag" were indescribable,
but the joy of the combat immense !

There are few relics of him at Eton. You may visit,
of course, Long Chamber in which as Colleger he at
first slept, and speculate how he will have decorated his
dark wood cubicle.^ But even at Cambridge the walls of
his room offered no hint of the future development of
his artistic power of choice. You can see the Upper
School where he will have worked, or idled, and observe
his name carved (later on, and not, of course, by his own
hand) on "Gladstone's door" to the left of Dr. Keate's
desk. That is about all. Even his brother, Mr. A. C.
Benson, who was living at Eton at this time with Mr.
Edward Lyttelton as a master, in " a quaint, white-gabled
house called Baldwin's Shore " overlooking Barnes Pool,
saw little enough of him, though, as Mr. Lyttelton's
private pupil, Hugh came in and out of the house quite
frequently. For several of Hugh's set were Mr. Benson's
own pupils, and for Hugh to have been intimate with
their tutor might, it was felt, create awkwardness on both
sides. In any case, the aloofness in which most Public
School boys live from their masters is something quite
astonishing to those accustomed to the far more homely
and accessible staff of most Catholic colleges.

Mr. A. C. Benson can supplement by a few lines
the almost total silence observed by Hugh concerning
his Eton friends. Since, indeed, he laments more than

^ He wrote once to his mother : " I have bought some stuff you stick on
windows, producing the most lovely stained glass, and have put some up in my
room." That is the only hint.

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1 882-1889 39

once that his Cambridge friends drop entirely out of
his life, I imagine that his school friendships did not
prove more permanent. They were, I daresay, formed
more on a basis of qualities which interested Hugh at
the moment, or harmonised with his inquisitive and
restless spirit, than on any deep foundation of affection
or tried fidelity. Mr. Benson writes :

The set of boys in which he lived was a curious
one ; they were fairly clever, but they must have been,
I gathered afterwards, quite extraordinarily critical and
quarrelsome. There was one boy in particular, a caustic,
spiteful, and extremely mischief-making creature, who
turned the set into a series of cliques and parties. Hugh
used to say afterwards that he had never known anyone
in his life with such an eye for other people's weak-
nesses, or with such a talent for putting them in the
most disagreeable light.^

It was to this set that the small boy belonged whom
Hugh was falsely accused of bullying. Not, indeed, that
Hugh was incapable of resenting what displeased him
or of imposing his views upon his neighbours.

The Rev. Dr. Lyttelton, now Headmaster of Eton,
has written :

A ludicrously-worded letter from him to his mother
had reference to a serious difference of opinion between
himself and two or three comrades on the one side, and
an unfortunate but objectionable neighbour.

The letter described a combined attack they were
meditating, which, if I remember right, threatened to take
the form of wrapping a towel round the offender's neck,
and pulling the ends as hard as they could until some-
thing happened ! I cannot be sure that the project was
ever carried out. This must have been in 1889.

His letter was excellent reading, the tone being quite
as grave as the solemnity of the occasion demanded.

^ Hugh, p. 41.

40 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

And his temper still revealed itself, as it was always
to remain, frequently hot to boiling-point.

He spread his athletic interests more widely than
did most of his fellows, but, perhaps, more thin. He
steered one of the boats on the Fourth of June, and a
photograph still survives of him in his white trousers
and middy's braided coat, with a dirk and enormous
Victorian bouquet. The mouth is already firmer, though
I do not think this can be the " new photo " at which,
Mrs. Benson wrote on February 7, 1888, " I so often
look, and think how it looks older and purposeful." Be-
coming a cox was a delight to him, and he displayed
the invitation to do so with pride. But besides the
rowing, he played cricket, though perhaps not keenly.
It was not a taste that actively survived.

"Your cricket successes," his mother writes on May 25,
1887, " were grand ! Think of dry-bobbing to that extent
while you are a wet bob I Well ! well ! — Genius is a great
thing, and it is well known that boys inherit from their
mother."

A little later it was from a precocious ambition to be
of practical use in crises that he suffered. His mother
wrote again from Addington Park on October 19, 1887 :

Dearest Laddie, — You and your Ambulances ! It
will be a great assistance in the holidays (to) have so ex-
perienced a surgeon at hand in case of accidents. I hope
we shall always wound ourselves, or break our bones, in
exact correspondence with what you have learnt — and,
having such strong family feeling, I have no doubt we
shall.

(I have only one fear connected with it — do give it
weight, Hugh. I am always anxious when I hear of your
taking up new things, for fear your work should suffer.
I don't mean only the actual preparation of given lessons,
but the reading that bears on it which you ought to be
doing at your present age — do think of this.)

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1882-1889 41

The only form of sport which was to remain a passion,
and now first reveals itself, was fishing.

{From Mrs. Benson.)

Lambeth Palacb, S.E.,
June 22, 1888.

most faithless of mortals (me this time) not to have
written on Tuesday. . . . About the rods. I have thought
it well over, and feel that I should like to give you one,
and a good one. So I should like you to get the middle
one of the three you spoke of. The price I can't quite
remember. You see, my darling, I want you to do well
whatever you do — and I am trusting you not to let it
interfere with your work. That is such a great and im-
portant thing that I should feel very reproachful if I
found you had fished when you ought to have been
working. But you are old enough not to fall into this
snare, and I must trust to this — and fishing, I want you
to fish well — and keep your rod in order, and not break
it or lose any, or spoil it in any way. So with every good
wish for your birthday I send it — antedating it by five
months.

At Eton, a scholar at any rate was expected to do
some work. Hugh's was "so poor," his brother says,
"that it became a matter for surprise among his com-
panions that he had ever won a scholarship." But Dr.
Lyttelton declares, more favourably :

... I remember almost nothing. Hugh at the age of
fourteen was a curious mixture of liveliness and dreami-
ness. His work was rather dishevelled in form but shewed
considerable promise.

1 should have put him among the second flight of
Collegers, and not quite up to the standard of the very
best.

He got into no scrapes, and seemed very happy.

At his home, however, more anxiety was felt. His
father, now Archbishop, displayed the utmost concern,
and perceived his ambitions, that Hugh should turn out

42 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

a " scholar " in the older and more academic sense, in
danger of never being realised. I quote from a series of
letters :

Lambeth Palace, S.E.,
May 7, 1887.

. . . You must take great pains to be accurate. This is
your snare now — and accurate only means that " you give
yourself carefully to a thing." It's not a gift like white
hair or a Roman nose.

The Queen's Jubilee week intervenes, and provides one

long distraction :

Lambeth Palace, S.E.,
June 25, 1887.

You will, like all of us, have had a week of regular
irregularity — everything that is usual broken in upon —
and I am sure you will never forget the Queen's Jubilee as
long as you live — may that be long . . . And now, dear
laddie, with all those wonderful pictures before your eyes,
and all those memories stored up, do ask God to make
nothing be in vain — and ask Him to make your work
steadier, and more careful and good every day. It is such
a pleasure, and happy thought for the future, when you
do well.

Addington Park, Croydon,
September 27, 1887.

. . . And there is one thing which you want the habit
of — but which your powers of resolution are quite equal to
— viz, to do the work in the first party and not in the last part
of the time allowed for it. You are capital in resolving to
get out of bed, and doing it — only be just as resolute about
the right moment for beginning work— and you would do
excellently. . . . God bless you. Don't forget Dr. Arnold's
prayer.

Addington Park, Croydon,
October 8, 1887.

I am glad you liked the box of instruments. They are
very good ones. And I had a box given me by my uncle
about your age, which perpetually serve me and comfort
me. So I thought you would like a set for your birthday
present.

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1882-1889 43

The unstudious boy is given a tutor for the summer
hoHdays, and on November 13, 1887, his father again
writes :

Nffvember 13, 1887.

. . . No doubt the holiday tutoring was very useful. . . .
Mr. Mitchell says you are '^ improving^' but that "there is
still room for Improvement^' — if there is room for " Im-
provement," pray ask him (Mr. Improvement) into it, and
get him to sit down. Be hospitable to him.^

That the situation was felt, at Lambeth, as acute, is

clear from a letter written by his mother at about this

same time.

Addington Park, Croydon,
October zt^, 1887.

By all means have bread and milk for supper,^ if you
like it best. ... I wonder how all goes with you. You
know, I needn't tell you that — you know how delightful I
think all good and nice amusements — but I am some-
times afraid, my dearest boy, that you may be forgetting
how critical this term is to you. I hate anything that
sounds like a threat — this isn't that — but it is a reminder.
Because the term is passing, and each day is fixing, whether
you will or no, your fate in a way quite different from the
ordinary way — and I know you are inclined at the moment
to lose sight of this. O Hugh, do remember all that was
said to you last holidays ! We only don't say it always
because there is no good in that, but it becomes like a tale
that is told — but our minds don't alter. We must help you
to gain character and purpose and all those things that

^ The Archbishop, on November 25, 1887, uses these words: "Martial is
very witty, is it not? so terse and neat." I wish diffidently to suggest that
anyone who could speak of Martial as " it" reveals that he still " felt " that
astoundingly human (though perhaps most displeasing) creature as a book, not
a man. This really differentiates the Archbishop's attitude — though it was not
confined to him — towards school study of the classics, from that which Hugh was,
I believe, capable of taking, but which, from lack of assistance, he never took.
Still, here was Hugh reading Martial at only just sixteen !

* Not that Hugh was above gastronomic preoccupations.

Eton College, Windsor. 1888.

Please ask Beth to send my hamper at once if she can — because we have
literally not one morsel to put in our mouths. We are literally starving, though
I don't wish in the least to alarm you, but we are wasting away with famine.

44 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

you need, and it must be by deeds now, not words. Deeds
which would be as sad to us as they would to you, but
which we should do all the same, with God's help. I feel
as if I were some one else writing to you — it came over me
so this morning how terribly critical it was — I didn't think
you seemed quite to be realising it — and I thought I must
just write one great plead to you, and then leave it — but
don't you leave it — do take it home to you — sixteen on
November i8th. Martin was only seventeen when he
came out head of the school at Winchester.

But a little later news comes that he is working better
— "only go on and on — there is plenty of possibility —
we know — do use it all."

The year 1888 passed in fitful improvement and

relapse. The Archbishop had been reading the Medea

of Euripides in Mr. Arthur Sidgwick's blue-backed edition,

with his son during the holidays, and on February 11, 1888,

he wrote :

Lambeth Palace, S.E.,
February ii, 1888.

My dearest Hughie, — I hope these cold winds have
not nipped your nose or your throat. I am slowly
struggling out of the serpentine coils of a cold which has
gripped me like a Laocoon all over.

I have even not cared for riding — but Maggie and
I went quickly round Battersea Park this morning.

When you have done a good bit of composition some
time soon, send it me. Have you found " Medea Sidgwick
Blue"/^//?

How we envy Nellie her sunshine, to say nothing of
her Niles and her Crocodiles and Obelisks !

I have got a beautiful book of " Monuments " which
reveal the fact that there are more beautiful things in
London than I knew of.

Make Mr. Luxmoore tell you how he thinks you are
going on and getting on — ask him straight out — and tell
me on Tuesday.

We are going down for a few hours to Winchester on
Monday. You remember why — and will remember us
there. Happy Sunday to you. — Your loving father,

Edw. Cantuar.

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1 882-1 889 45
To his mother, Hugh himself would write :

Eton College, Windsor. 1888.
Mr. Lyttelton has been talking to me, and I am going
to work just lots — I am going to read Green's history
this half, and begin to learn Italian, by myself. I am
glad I am not to be made to learn it, solemnly, for two
hours a day — I hate that.

On March 23, 1888, the Archbishop wrote from
Lambeth Palace to Hugh, who was working up for Trials
in Mr. A. C. Benson's room :

... I quite agree that your handwriting is improving
very much. It looks very neat, and is very legible — and
will be, I think, a good scholarly hand.

May 4, 1888.

How are you getting on ? Who are you up to ? What
are your books ? Can I send you anything ? Mind you
tell me all.

Yet just a year afterwards the anxious note sounds
unaltered :

May 19, 1889.

I hope you are not letting the classical work be im-
paired — I rather thought some of the edges seemed a
little rubbed off in the last construing I heard of yours.
Of course you must not let that happen, whatever you do.

Of course, too, the fact remains that Hugh Benson never
became a " scholar " in any sense, and never wanted to,
and probably never could have, become one. Even had
the order, say, of a religious superior, made it his duty
to apply himself consistently to " scholarship," he would
quite certainly have been miserable, and therefore un-
successful. Even in his chosen department, ascetical
and mystical theology, he never could work save by fits
and starts ; and at Rome, when his new Catholic fervour,
environment, and the subject, conspired to make study
tolerable to him, he cries out, at the prospect of an

46 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

obligatory three years of theology, " I doubt whether I
COULD have stood it."

Possibly the violent clash of this artist's temperament
with the clumsy method mostly in vogue at Eton and, of
course, nearly everywhere else, when Benson was a boy,
was responsible for the fact that after four years he " had
learned so to hate the classics that I have never, willingly,
read a Greek play since ; I fumbled, the other day only,
over a sum in simple division, and it has never entered
my head to try and win a Latin Verse prize in the West-
minster Gazette. . . . There are to-day, I suppose, still
left two subjects which I can study without repugnance
— history and English ; since in neither of these two
branches of knowledge can I remember a single lesson
ever being given me while I was at school."

In the same article, which appeared in Everyman,
December 24, 191 2, he asserts that at his crammer's,
where he went for a year after leaving Eton, he learnt
"not just a few examinational tips, a few brilliant and
telling touches, but more of the solid principles of
mathematics, more of the general outlines of history in
its broad and really important aspect, more of the real
glories of the classics . . . than in all my four years at
Eton." In Brittany, too, where he spent a month or so,
he found that French was a language in which " . . . real
ideas could be conveyed," and learnt more of it than
ever at Eton. He puts this down to the total disregard
at Eton (and, of course, he explicitly declares, at all of
the greater public schools) of the idiosyncrasies of the
individual. Over all alike rolls the traditional Juggernaut.
Eton is, however, without guessing it, the most insane of
specialists, he urges, and drills the boys remorselessly in
a sub-department of classical study, and teaches them to

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1 882-1 889 47

wield a few only of the tools of the most narrow-minded
and complacent class in the world, "the classical gram-
marian." He concludes by lamenting the dreariness of
such teaching as is given, and asks, " Whose business was
it to interest me, if not my masters' ? "

The best retort which I have seen addressed to this
article appeared in the same periodical, from the pen
of an Eton master, and its simplest argument was that
Hugh Benson was speaking of an Eton already twenty
years distant. The writer could point to increased special-
isation, and could plead the apologia of wearied masters,
and could mention, as contrary instance, Mr. A. C. Benson
himself and the history lessons which he made famous.
Of course, " instances to the contrary " prove little. Prob-
ably all schools will have at least one master in them
who can " interest " his boys, or even thrill them, like
E. E. Bowen of Harrow, or Cory of Eton, or Mr. A. C.
Benson. The question of amount of specialisation, and
its proper moment, is, moreover, still an open one. And
though much was dead in the old education given in our
schools, much is shoddy in the tinkering that goes on too
often nowadays, and is called reform. It is even a ques-
tion whether to live vulgarly be not worse than to die like
Sir Leicester Dedlock. It remains that Hugh Benson did
not solve his problem. Even he would have probably
granted that in modern schools chaos has often replaced
petrifaction, and that no more educationally appalling
spectacle can be conceived than a would-be educational
establishment simultaneously blanched by the blight of
the examination system and harassed by the chameleon-
tinted whims of modernizers.

Of course all purely intellectual education should be
subordinated to the general training of the character.

48 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

This was what preoccupied, I need not say, the mind of
the Archbishop and his wife far beyond mere scholarship.

By quoting a few extracts from his parents' letters, I
may make it clear what tendencies in Hugh needed, in
their opinion, stimulus or check.

I am sure [the Archbishop wrote on May 7, 1887],
you won't forget all our talks about Confirmation — and,
what is much more important, you will be sure to re-
member Confirmation itself— your promises — and the cer-
tainty that God will give you the strength you need — . . .
let your last day at home before going to school be a day
that shall leave happy and sweet memories with everyone.
Do you understand ? — I hope you will have a happy and
thoughtful Sunday.

Hugh had indeed showed, at first, however, no attrac-
tion towards Confirmation, and that rite had been post-
poned for a year or two. This tendency to laisser aller
was very marked at this time and annoyed his father

gravely.

Addington Park, Croydon,
October 21, 1887.

I asked you particularly at once to answer me a certain
question, I was depending on the answer coming at
once. Please let me know directly.

I want also to know how you think you are doing in
school.

I wrote very fully lately about other things. And so
I will add no more.

I wish you a good and happy Sunday. — Your affec-
tionate father, Edw. Cantuar.

His mother saw the same need for accentuating the

harder or more self-sacrificing side of his life :

Addington Park, Croydon,
November 17, 1887.

Dearest of dear Boys, — All best and sweetest
wishes for to-morrow. . . . My own dear boy, you know
I long that you may have all best blessings — specially
just now the development of manhood which sixteen

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1 882-1 889 49

years seems appropriate to — . . . Come home to us proud
and happy.

Incidentally, one may add that his tendency, now, to
slackness showed itself in a total inability to keep accounts,
which, indeed, pursued him throughout life, with the ex-
ception of pathetic periods of attempted accuracy.^ But
having said this, I must undoubtedly emphasize the fact
that by no means was any radical nervelessness or apathy
then or ever apparent in him. He was full of his own
interests, and endlessly busy over them. Moreover, he
loved his home ties, and was " fussy " for letters from Mrs.
Benson, who wrote regularly on Tuesdays, with the rarest
lapses, due to the enormous exactions of the Archi-
episcopal career. With his sister, too, he was on the best
of terms. A characteristic letter survives, to write which
mother and sister joined :

May 12. 1888.

Dearest Laddie, — I did enjoy your letter immensely,
and I am going now to be quite regular again in writ-
ing. I haven't been very well — and things have been
difficult. . . . Oh ! oh ! did they call his hammock an " un-
necessary luxury" ?2 Never mind — [Miss Margaret Benson

^ (From Mrs. Benson)

Lambeth Palace, S.E.,
July IS, 1889.
N.B. — Mind you write to me fully about this [unpaid boat subscription at
Eton], for I must know all about it thoroughly. It amounted to £2, os. od. Do
give your mind to be careful about money — and accounts . . . situated as we are,
it is even more important for us than for others to be very careful.

But we shall see that later on he has his accounts kept for him, and had a
good head for money matters.

Nor was he even now unaware of certain temperamental deficiencies. He
writes in 1887 (?) :

" Could you send me 5s. of the los. that I have during the half — I had rather
not have the whole lOs. at once, as I know I should spend it all too quick."

^ Hugh had observed about the authority who had forbidden him to put his
hammock up :

" I should love to tell him that he is quite ' unnecessary,' and certainly not a
' luxury,' and therefore he mayn't be • up.' I never heard such bosh ! "

I D

so ROBERT HUGH BENSON

continues.] Mama couldn't finish this, so I am going
to. . . . We are going to Parties to-night — to dinner, and
then on, like regular Londoners, to the Russian ambassa-
dor's. Beth wants me to put on a soiled dress, because
she says she always reckons that foreigners' houses will
be dirty. Mr. B. has come to-day. He looks rather stiff,
I think, but you may put him on your list — who knows?
It is such an inscrutable list.

On his side, Hugh appealed willingly to his sister at

intellectual crises :

Eton College, Windsor,
May 12.

I have been elected to " College Pop," and have to
make my opening speech next Saturday on "Sunday
Closing," and have written to Maggie to ask her for some
arguments about it : I want several, as I shall have to
speak last, and therefore shall probably have several taken
by other people before my turn comes.

I seem thus to perceive in Hugh a personality full of
" stuff," fluid as yet, but destined to " set " very firmly and
to take the stamp with edges unusually cleanly cut. But
that was for the future.

Meanwhile religion was, not quite wholly in abeyance,
perhaps, but dormant in the main.

"I cannot recall," Mr. Hill affirms, "any strong religious
feeling in Hugh. I remember him telling me with rather a
show of boredom how he was expected ' to go to chapel ' in
the holidays at Addington every day, or at least take part

in some service — after breakfast, I think it was. He, S ,

and myself used to snatch a fearful joy in watching X

conducting the services in chapel and imitating him after-
wards."

Reverence for the essential object of religion and a
detached, even amused, criticism of its cult, can quite
well go together, as Greek and medieval history can show,
and as Hugh's own life will, by many examples, prove ; or
can it be that at this period he was anticipating "that

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1882-1889 51

terrible age " (of eighteen) when " the soul seems to have
dwindled to a spark overlaid by a mountain of ashes —
when blood and fire and death and loud noises seem
the only things of interest, and all tender things shrink
back and hide from the dreadful noonday of manhood " ? *
This, of course, would at any time be true no more
than partially of Hugh Benson, who was never particu-
larly noisy, less so even than the average public school
boy, who can be relied upon to conceal his callow
instincts, save on the occasions strictly scheduled by
public opinion, under the most rigidly non-committal
mask ; and he was never purely destructive, even when
he took vehemently to sport. Here, too, he followed
his own line, his father and mother having been con-
fessedly " Buddhists " in the matter of taking life, while
to the Archbishop, wantonly to destroy flower or fern
appeared a downright breach of the Commandment which
forbids man to take in vain the name of his Maker.

Hugh therefore asked at last when his Confirmation
was to occur, and was genuinely astonished to find it had
been put off because he had shown no sincere desire for
it. He had regarded it as a kind of " spiritual coming-of-
age" which happened automatically. At least, he felt,
the Archbishop ought to have "given him a lead."

Dr. Lyttelton writes of Hugh's "preparation " :

I can recall the exact spot in a huge armchair where
he sat and I was preparing him for his Confirmation. I
don't think he understood much, and was not the sort of
boy to feel very deeply the sense of sin.

And Hugh recalls that these half-dozen talks, according
to the custom of that time, went chiefly on the topics of
morality and the need of being strenuous. A suggestion,

^ Ltg'At Invisible, p. 19.

52 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Hugh says, of " informal confession," elicited, naturally, the
response that he had nothing to reveal. Dr. Goulburn's
book. Personal Religion^ was presented to him, and remained
with pages uncut. A discussion on the propriety of fives
being played in the afternoon issued in a decision favour-
able to the game, which was played, however, with a
"slightly chastened air." He lost the Maltese cross his
mother gave him, and was depressed at the feeling, sin-
cerely obeyed at first, that Communion, more impressive
than Confirmation, implied a duty of behaving better in the
future. A copy of Bishop Ken's Prayers for Winchester
scholars, in the "gracious formality" of their Caroline
English, and discovered in a store-room at Lambeth,
touched his imagination. He used it assiduously for a
few months — then dropped it, and with it all prayer, and
confined his Communions to occasions when absence
would have caused remark.

Not that the Chapel failed to affect him, though it still
lacked the dignity of bronze and rich blue marble for its
altar, and had less coat-armour on the walls of its ante-
chapel, than since the Boer War, to give it colour. Still,
the manifold slender and soaring lines of its Perpendicular
architecture create spontaneously the effect of aspiration,
and the singing is sometimes beautiful, and often of that
" heartiness " which impresses visitors so profoundly and
is not too curiously examined into, as to cause and quality,
even by the singer. Apart, however, from such emotions
as the place and time might afford, there was no
strengthening of the soul by dogma : the professors of
religion themselves held but rarely to clear dogmatic
creed, and, anyhow, in a representative institution like a
big public school, especially when it is one of the older
foundations, to preach a definite dogma is impossible.

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1882-1889 53

Above all, Benson argues, in things spiritual as in things
intellectual, there was no catering for the individual soul ;
nothing comparable to "direction" — he will not say, to
" confession." In the Confirmation " jaws," dogma might
have reared a timid head, and personal confidences have
been solicited. Benson's tutor did indeed ask him if he
had any "difficulties," and, when he recovered from the
shock, he answered No, having, he afterwards declared
(in Everyman^ January 3, 1913), at least twenty or thirty
topics on which it would have benefited him enormously
throughout life to have spoken, in properly safeguarded
confidence, to a wise man. Briefly, it may be asserted
that there is no possible substitute for the confessional,
or, rather, for a priest accustomed to that tribunal and
thoroughly trained. When Benson alludes in Everyman
to the Evangelical schools with their heart-to-heart talks
and "conversions," and to the Anglican schools which,
like those of the Woodard foundation, have some sort of
approximation, exteriorly, to the Catholic system, he
knows quite well he does so only in an effort to be
impartial, and also, perhaps, to recommend his view
more easily to a general public such as he sought to
reach when writing in that periodical ; and that really
there is no kind of comparison to be made between them
and the immemorial Catholic practice and elaborated
theory. No claims of courtesy and tolerance demand
of us that we should in any way delude ourselves or
others upon this point. In consequence, therefore, of
this lack of personal direction, or even of general
dogmatic instruction, the mystical element in boys tends
to break out fantastically, or at least quite indefinably —
and it is constantly forgotten what incurable mystics most
boys turn out to be, intermittently at least, and probably

54 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

in secret. In Catholic schools all religion is canalised,
so to say, and even devotion flows mainly within fixed
limits. Where religion was firmly taught at home, it
would show itself, at Eton, say, in the voluntary
attendance of a very considerable number of boys at the
Communion Service in the parish church when none
was provided in the chapel. Where the family was
High Church, it might produce an apostle who should
form a group to recite Compline each night ; where it
was Evangelical, " conversion " might be responsible for
Bible-meetings and prayer, terminated at once, on the
only occasion on which Benson assisted, by an explo-
sion of half-hysterical laughter. This, it must be owned,
was "wholly uncharacteristic of Eton," as was the
horrible incident which he relates in his Confessions.
His Low Church evangelist invited an "old boy" to
come down to Eton and address the House, which he
did, emotionally, and giving his speech the air of a con-
fession. Naturally the boys were appalled at the offence
— for as such everyone, not Eton boys alone, must feel
it — against sheer " form " and taste. For a boy, sin
and sanctity are above all else to be kept secret. To
expose the roots of his soul, or indeed any part of
that shrinking thing's construction, should be, for him,
the grossest of indecencies.

It would be idle to dwell upon Hugh Benson's
reminiscences of the Eton moral code. It is that of all
public schools, and has nothing to do with theology or
even the Ten Commandments. If you don't interfere with
others, others will let you alone ; boots hurled at boys who
persist in saying their prayers survive only as adornments
of those school-stories which are written for the entertain-
ment of aunts and others who like to imagine they know

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1882-1889 55

what their nephew's life at school is like, and are rightly
clear that it is not probable he will tell them. A strictly
limited truthfulness, a very curious scheme of " honour,"
athletic courage, verbal modesty, liberality, and clean-
ness in dressing and eating are exacted by Public Opinion
as Good Form, and what may have gone to fashion this
it appears to me idle even to attempt to formulate. It
remains that it is as ridiculous to regard a public school
as a " sink " or " den " of iniquity (these are the words
one mostly has heard used), as to describe a Catholic
school as an enclosed paradise of virtue. Each has its
code, which can only be appreciated by close and
sympathetic study ; and even where the codes may coin-
cide, the whole interior attitude may be so different —
at least at certain levels in the boys' souls — that to compare
the two is to court the utmost error.

It is interesting to observe that the Archbishop, in the
very year that was supplying Hugh with the best materials
for these future reflections, was writing, on his sixtieth
birthday, an autobiographical note. In it he says :

Now, if I think — what would I do quite differently
if it came again ? The plainest point is, that I would speak
to my boys much more religiously — and straight to the
point of Love of God, in educating a great school. The
chapel and the sermons not individual enough, though,
so far as they went, right and not to be changed.

His son also demanded an insistence on that Love
which alone should be capable of ousting its own
caricatures. Yet perhaps he and Hugh — the Catholic
Hugh, at any rate — were never really at one about what
vital religion really was. It will not be denied that the
Archbishop actively disliked as well as disbelieved in
Catholicism, and, though he could, as we saw, "think

S6 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

with a workman's mind," he never could look out at
heaven and earth with Catholic eyes.^

However, the time had come for Hugh to choose
a career, and his tastes inclined, it seemed, towards the
Indian Civil Service. That this was a disappointment to
his father cannot be denied ; but nothing can equal the
loyalty with which the Archbishop refrained from coercing
his son's liberty, and demanded nothing more than that
the situation should be clearly stated and deliberately
thought out.

He wrote on May 27, 1889 :

Lambeth Palace, S.E.

... I want you to have clear before you the questions
which we have to decide, and I shall be ready to hear
your views about them — and I pray that we may be led
to make a right decision. [He puts the case, and re-
capitulates.] The three plans are —

1. To try for the I.C.S. in 1890 : — To do so with the
best chance of success seems to involve your leaving
Eton this summer. [He adds on re-reading :] If you
failed in 1890, what would you do ? — there would be a year
between tka( and Cambridge ordinarily.

2. To try for the I.C.S. in 1890 without leaving Eton
now — and to go on at Eton, if you fail, until 1891. This
does not seem very hopeful as regards success for India.

3. To give up the I.C.S. and go on at Eton till the
time comes for going to Cambridge. ... If this latter
plan is adopted, I hope you would not find the stimulus
removed, and that you would really work on with all your
might at classics and mathematics mainly. I should be
much disappointed if you worked less well.

Now, then, the choice is before you, and you must
think it over and let me know.

^ Nothing is stranger than to read, as a Catholic, his comments on — I will
choose two points — the practice of the Confessional and its results, and modem
monasticism, especially in modern Italy. His views are so utterly justified from
his point of view, and yet so psychologically untrue to fact, while so exclusive
even of the surmise that they are thus untrue. ...

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1882-1889 57

From the same :

Lambeth Palace, S.E.,
June 3, 1889.

My dearest Hugh, — I am very sorry to think of your
leaving Eton. The loss of a year in the Sixth can never
be made up, and in your case it would be two years. All
the good of school then gets concentrated and made
productive. But I said you should, if you resolved on
desiring it, have a chance of entering the Indian Civil
Service, and so I shall not throw any obstacle in your
way by any action of mine. ... It will be grievous work
parting with you for India, but God watches there as well
as here, " without slumbering or sleeping."

I hope you often say over the Psalm Quicumque Confidit.

Hugh decided that the Indian Civil Service was what
he really wanted, and on June 20 the Archbishop noted
in his diary :

A new power of manliness seems to have come over
him. I trust, in answer to the many prayers, "that he
may know himself to be God's servant and God's child,
and live as to the Lord, and not as to men."

" Our little sheltered boy ! " his mother says and breaks
my heart. I always reckoned on this one to be my great
friend as I grew old.

It is no doubt true that Hugh had been working harder
for some time, and had won his way into " First Hundred,"
as the Sixth Form with the next three classical divisions in
the school are habitually and officially called.

On April 28 his mother wrote from Lambeth :

April 28.

Hurrah ! and Hurrah ! for the First Hundred. I am
that glad, and so are we all. I told your father in the
middle of a distinguished company — I couldn't hold it in
— and he was so glad. . . . Let the term be a beautiful
one, my own dear boy, full of work and all lovely things.
I hate your reading Truth and Police News. Do think
better of it . . . it's like preferring a sewer to the Thames.

58 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Moreover, he wrote for the Hervey Prize Poem, on
Father Damien, and won it, which caused everybody quite
as much astonishment as pleasure.^ But for all that he
was condemned to leave Eton, and on his last night there
he wrote ;

I write this on Thursday evening after ten. Peel
keeping passage.^

My feelings on leaving are —
Excitefuent.

Foreboding of Wren's and fellows there.
Sorrow at leaving Eton.
Pride at being an old Etonian.
Certain pleasure in leaving for many trivial matters.
Feeling of importance.
Frightful longing for India.
Homesickness.

DEAR ME!^

^ Yet he had shown an astonishing bent for versification. Two poems of his
survive from 1881, of which some lines are quoted in the Appendix. Also in
1888 or 1889 he wrote two stories : Fate, and an unnamed ghost story. I give the
outline of these in the same place. In The Present Etonian, November 6,
1888, is a conventionally humorous account of a Village Concert ; and in House-
hold Queries rather later, a Tennysonian epic, a poem on Loki.

2 "Peel is Sidney Peel, then in Sixth Form. The passages are patrolled
by the Sixth Form from ten to half-past, to see that no boy leaves his room
without permission." A. C. Benson, Hugh, p. 46.

' There are very few relics of this period. One is a letter from Beth who,
Mr. A. C. Benson tells us, found letter-writing most laborious :

Addington Park, Croydon.

[? November, 1887] Tuesday.
Dearest, — One line to tell you I am sending your Box to-morrow, Wednesday.
I hope you will get it before tea-time. I know you will like something for
tea ; you can keep your cake for your Birthday. I shall think about you on
Friday. Everybody has gone away, so I had no one to write for me. I thought
you would not mind me writing to you. Dearest love from your dear

Beth.

A deliciously frightful sepia sketch, too, survives. It shows two leafless trees
with carrion crows seated on them. The sky is black ; rain pours down. From
a marsh a hand protrudes, and on it is a label bearing the words, A RoTTiNG
Corpse. Upon the back of this is to be found his time-table for the "First

AT CLEVEDON AND ETON, 1882-1889 59

Hugh Benson left Eton, then, and if we are unable to
detect during his stay there much that will be characteristic,
we can certainly notice in this final document a really
remarkable self-knowledge. Few boys would own, in the
very first place, to excitement ; few, to apprehension of
the next step to be taken and of the equals to be expected
there. To note that one "feels important" is frank
beyond the common; the "frightful longing" for India
is in itself a revelation. No amount of fear could annul
the desire of the moment. This fear and this " appetite "
will accompany him through life. And the home-sickness
is, I take it, for the England and the parents he would
leave when India summoned him, and by no means for
Eton ; for her, he has already expressed his qualified
regrets. And the whole ends with the supremely charac-
teristic exclamation which he will use to the end when
standing aghast at the bewilderments of life and its exac-
tions ; and, after all, it was long ago decided that the
mother of all philosophy was Wonder.

Hundred." It includes hours for Herodotus, Livy, Horace, Vergil, the Baccha,
the Epistle to the Romans, Greek and Latin prose, Latin verse and Greek
iambics. Besides this I find only one note-book, full of drawings of butterflies
and moths, with very full notes. The drawings are really excellent for a boy of
his age, and suggest that he will always do better at diagrams than at realistic
sketches. I must however note the possibility of this note-book, though found
with Hugh Benson's possessions, having been in reality the work of Mr. E. F.
Benson. It must be, too, confessed that his handwriting is better at this period
than ever it was to be again, though less characteristic.

CHAPTER III

AT WREN'S, 1889-1890

I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds ;

Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds

From the hid battlements of Eternity ;

Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then

Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.

Francis Thompson.

Hugh Benson left Eton, then, before his time, and after a
brief stay abroad was sent to a crammer's, whose assistance
was regarded by Hugh's family as an "operation" made
necessary by his somewhat unsatisfactory intellectual
progress.

He went, however, first of all to Dinan, and on June 30
his father wrote the following letter, quoted also by Mr.
A. C. Benson in Hugh. It is so characteristic that I make
no apology for quoting it again in full :

Lambeth Palace, S.E.,
June 30, 1889.

My dearest Hughie, — We have been rather mourn-
ing about not hearing one word from you. We supposed
all would be right as you were a large party. But one
word would be so easy to those who love you so, who
have done all they could to enable you to follow your
own line, against their own wishes and affection !

We hope at any rate you are writing to-day. And we
have sent off " Pioneers and Founders," which we hope
will both give you happy and interesting Sunday reading
and remind you of us.

Mr. Spiers writes that you are backward in French,
but getting on rather fast.

I want you now at the beginning of this cramming
year to make two or three Resolutions, besides those which
you know and have thought of often and practised :

60

AT WREN'S, 1 889-1 890 61

I. To determine never to do any secular examination
work on Sundays — to keep all reading that day as fitting
"The Lords Day," and the "Day of Rest."

I had a poor friend who would have done very well
at Oxford, but he would make no difference between
Sunday and other days. He worked on just the same —
and in the examination itself , just as the goal was reached,
he broke down and took no degree. The doctors said
it was all owing to the continuous nervous strain. If he
had taken the Sundays it would just have saved him.

Lord Selborne was once telling me of his tremendous
work at one time, and he said, " I never could have done it,
but that I took my Sundays. I never would work on them."

We have arranged for you to go over to the Holy
Communion one day at Dinan. Perhaps some nice
fellow will go with you — Mr. Spiers will, anyhow. Tell
us which Sunday, so that we may all be with you.

Last night we dined at the Speaker's, to meet the
Prince and Princess of Wales. It was very interesting.
The Terrace of the House of Commons was lighted with
electric light. A steamer went by and cheered !

The Shah will fill London with grand spectacles, and
I suppose his coming will have much effect on politics —
perhaps of India too. All are well. — Ever your most
loving father, Edw. Cantuar.

I am going to preach at the Abbey to-night.

Hugh remained very pleased with the progress he made
in French ; but he never kept it up, and, incredible as it may
seem, he went through life unable either really to read or talk
it, though in the work, both literary and personal, to which
he gave himself, it may be described as only just not essential.

By mid-July, indeed, he has finished with French, and is
in Switzerland, I gather, on the way to his uncle, Mr. Chris-
topher Benson, who lived at Wiesbaden. His father speaks
of "your changed far-away life," and adds on July 12, 1889 :

You must be sure to keep up the high strong line of
manliness which all your training has led you on to. And
you will not forget that he cannot be a true "man"

62 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

who is not a " man of GOD." . . . Don't forget about
working on Sunday. Never do it. Regard it — as it is —
as the '' Day of Rest and Worships

One fragment from his stay in France is worth pre-
serving :

We went a long expedition yesterday, sixty miles there
and back, by carriage : and returning, I ran about seven
miles out of the thirty by the side of the carriage, and am
hardly at all stiff this morning.

I send you one photograph of myself and a splendid
Algerian greyhound " Simoun," who can keep well up
with an average train fifteen miles, and a carriage a
hundred and fifty miles : this also shows the colour of
my hands and face very accurately : I have also grown
about four feet : and another of a fishing expedition we
went : I should like the one of the dog and me back
when I come, as I have not another of it, and I want to
keep them all together.

By July 22 the news that he had won the Hervey

Prize Poem had reached Lambeth. "Dr. Warre," writes

his father, "says it has a very good tone about it and a

quiet thoughtfulness that lends it a charm." I believe

that these poems were not printed, and doubtless the loss

of such compositions is not heavy : still, it would have

been entertaining to see Hugh at his most academic and

conventional. This poem brought him, a little later, as

a present from the Archbishop, a portrait of Father

Damien's " fine, kind, benevolent, determined face."

Hotel db la Plage, Portrieux,
July 25, 1889.
My dear Papa, — Thank you very much for your letter :
I was so tremendously surprised about the Hervey Prize.^

^ To his mother he wrote :

Portrieux, y«i^ 27.

I was so enormously surprised about the Hervey Prize — I had so little thought
of getting it, that I had forgotten all about it, and for the first moment couldn't
remember what it was.

Nothing could better exemplify his already triumphant instinct for forgetting
what was past and going straight on to the next thing.

AT WREN'S, 1 889-1 890 63

I should like to stay with Mr. Kevill Davies very much :
it sounds very nice, and should prefer to have only one
room : it would seem more compact and altogether nicer,
I think, to have all my things in one room.

H. seemed to like Mrs. Kevill Davies very much.

I think also that it would be very convenient lunching
at Mr. Spiers' ; I should only have to, I believe, four times
a week : and the other two days I could go back to Long-
ridge Road : Isn't it a pity about H. ? He has been work-
ing tremendously, sometimes fourteen hours a day : and
they all said he was certain to get in — but he failed. He
was in the Indian and Civil — I should think probably he
overworked.

I suppose Mama will write and tell me the particulars
of my journey. I can leave here any day on or after
next Thursday. — Your very loving son,

Robert Hugh Benson.

Hugh had not, however, concerned himself at first with
staying at a stranger's. On June 10 he had characteristi-
cally written to his mother :

Eton College, Windsor,
J^une ID, 1889.

I have got a lovely idea, but don't say anything about
it yet : I don't know if it would be possible, but I don't
see why not.

To have two rooms in Morton's Tower got ready, I
could bring up all my things from Eton and furnish them,
or at least one of them, and stay there always. I could
come over for meals in the house while you were there ;
and when you were not there, Mrs. Humphreys or Mrs.
Parker could cook for me : it would be lovely.

It would have all the advantages of lodgings, such as
being able to go in and out when I wished, besides having
none of the disadvantages.

Meanwhile Hugh is learning to climb, and apparently
taking risks. An echo is heard in a letter from his mother :
" The fearful incident of the rocks and the rope made my
blood run rather cold."

64 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Early in August he is at Wiesbaden, and there spends
a few days to learn some German. He is enthusiastic
over his progress, and his mother, with deliberate humour,
hopes he is getting on as fast with German as he did with
French. German, too, alas ! remained an unlearnt lan-
guage for him always. Of incidents at Wiesbaden none
can be recalled save the purchase of a fox-cub, which
Mrs. Benson regretted because it was extravagant (and
he was sending in no accounts of his expenditure !), and he
couldn't possibly carry it about with him. Beth, on her
side, implored his mother to forbid him keeping it. " Foxes
are so sly, and it'll be sure to kill him when it gets older." ^

In mid-August he returned to England by way of Paris
— " I saw the Exhibition," he writes, " and went half-way
up the Eiffel Tower ; just marvellous : ' Is it seen with the
eyes ? ' is the first thing you think when you are near " ^ —
and went to Wren's and Gurney's coaching establishment,
lodging at the Rev. Kevill Davies's house in Kensington,
for, on his return, he found he had crossed his family on
their way out to the Riffel Alp where the Archbishop often
went for a holiday. From Zermatt his mother wrote
to him :

Zermatt, August 25, 1889.

It is most horrid to be holiday-making here without
you, and to think of you grinding your nine hours a day in
stuffy old London. Still — India beckons, and Hugh says
" I come " — and there is certainly no other way of
coming. . . . There have been very few accidents this
year. One man, who is getting better, rolled down the
Matterhorn about 1200 feet, and bounded over two glaciers
in his roll, he preserving complete consciousness all the
time, and calculating whether or not he would fall into

^ At Eton he is remembered for his fondness of animals. He proposed to
cajole the Archbishop into keeping kangaroos at Addington.

* This was an exclamation of Beth's when she first saw a snow mountain in
Switzerland.

AT WREN'S, 1 889-1 890 65

the glacier. When he stopped he got up — and had his
ice-axe in his hand all the time.

From the same place his father wrote two days later a
long letter of advice on the importance of sleep and
exercise, and concludes :

You know we fear our dear Martin did not know their
importance.

He adds :

Keep your prayers and a few verses of the Bible-
reading very undisturbed by anxieties — and as each piece
of work begins, just quietly for one moment " lift up your
heart," — SvRSVM CoR. Then all will go in peace — and
your fortnightly (or weekly) communion I am sure you
will not omit. It has been such a strength and growth to
you — testis sum.

And he repeats the advice on September 12, 1889,
adding :

It is a good thing both physically and spiritually to
do what Prudentius says —

., ,,, Corpus licet fatiscens

Jaceat recline paullum
Jesum tamen sub ipso
Meditabiniur sopore ;

which Martin translated :

Then let the weary body

A little while repose :
The last thought be of Jesus

Before thine eyelids close.

(You know the temporal use of .y«^ = just before.)

It was at this period that one of Miss M. Benson's
letters reveals for a moment the peculiarly close relations
existing between herself and Hugh. She habitually wrote
him letters of a unique charm. She had the Greek " irony " ;
and after most sensitive descriptions of scenery — Egypt,

66 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Tenedos, Troy — which had really impressed her by its
beauty or associations, was able herself to prick any
bubble of pomposity or preciosity she might seemingly
have blown, by the pin-point of her humour. Her ex-
tremely acute comments on, for instance, visitors, ecclesi-
astical duties, and the like, show a real mental detachment
and objective power of " realising " what an atmosphere of
ecclesiastical domesticity might tend normally to distort,^
and she would laugh whole-heartedly at the " high talk,"
" such as," Beth said, " our gentlemen talk."

She, inspired by sitting in the chair of the Priest of
Dionysus in the theatre at Athens, asks to be helped by
Hugh, through reading and discussion, to get above the
narrowing life of "doing my Duty." To be absorbed in
" helping others " she sees to be " certain ruin." She wants
to read with him, not as " a covert way of improving you —
only I would rather read with you than with anyone — you
like poetry, I know — besides — well — you are you — I wonder
whether you know how much I have felt that, from the
time when I used to teach you out of Reading without
Tears — right up to now — when our relation is an equal
one — for age matters so little after the very first years of
all " ; and at the time of his eighteenth birthday she adds :

I have been considering you as well over eighteen for
some time past. ... I must stop if this is to reach you
before what Beth persists in calling your birthafa^, meaning
your \i\x\hinoment, i.e. 9.20 to-night. I remarked that the
whole day was your birthday. She said. Oh ! she thought
not — it was 9.20.

I've been thinking that when some one edits your Life
and letters, they will be puzzled over " Brer Rabbit," ^ and

^ And indeed it may in all courtesy be confessed that it would be difficult to
encounter a family more serenely able and willing to observe and assess its own
members than is hers.

* Her nickname for Hugh.

AT WREN'S, 1 889-1 890 67

will rightly conjecture that " Brer " means brother, and
make a brilliant suggestion that " Rabbit " is really a mis-
reading for " Robert." Don't you think so ? Good-bye.

In one sentence she reveals quite a number of intimate
little facts.

^^ None of your dress clothes are here," .she wrote in
answer to a passionate appeal. " Beth says you must have
them all." But, Miss Benson adds, a van will be needed
for the transport of his boots.

And in a homely line or two she throws all that we
have of light on Hugh's stay at his crammer's :

September 15, 1889.

I am sorry the other boys are like that — cads. But it's
only, I suppose, what is to be expected, as Beth would say.
But I am glad you have K. and D.

The fastidious Hugh came away from the risks of his
environment untainted, but he failed in his examination for
the Indian Civil Service, and it was settled he should go
to Trinity College, Cambridge, and read there for Classical
Honours.

In Benson, however, no mood, good or bad, maintained
itself, at this period at any rate, for very long ; and quite
apart from a tangential interest in Theosophy, which sent
him, while at Wren's, down by-ways full of excitement, if
not of pleasantness, he found his arid waste refreshed
by two sources, one of which was music, and the other
J. H. Shorthouse's romance, John Inglesant. Of music
I hope to speak later, here it must sujEfice to say that its
enchantment drew him again and again to St. Paul's,
and put a soul into its ceremonies ; and, as to Isabel Norris
in By What Authority, the echoing dignity of the Cathedral
gave the first hint to Hugh of what corporate worship
might mean. Liddon, then preaching there, did not more

68 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

than passingly affect him ; the boy sat in organ-loft or
stall, and let the music sweep his soul about, and cleansed
his spiritual faculties from the clogging experience of
merely materialistic behaviour. It may not have strength-
ened him ; but at least it kept him active.

Of unreckonable importance was his encounter with
John Inglesant. The strange history of this book is known.
Written when its author was in full middle-age, delayed
by the obstinate publishers till he was old, it obtained
a success which savoured of the portentous. Doubtless
this was due not wholly to its literary merits : it is long ;
it lacks balance ; it has no climax ; it is episodic. But
it suited a party in the English Church, and this Quaker's
romance played a considerable part in Anglican propaganda.
But the sensation it created was incomparably wider and
more varied than is produced by anything just sectarian.
Shorthouse has managed to cast over persons, scenery,
and episodes a glamour so enchanting that there is hardly
any part that does not throb with vitality. He lights up
what he touches, as it were, from within : it is as though
sunlight were entangled in some fruit-tree all in flower ;
the very petals become incandescent ; you can almost
see the sap circulating, like bubbles of light, in the delicate
veins of the leaves. Boyhood's imagination (if one more
witness may be added to Hugh Benson's) falls an easy
victim to John Inglesant, whose very name has something
(I once fancifully felt) of that virility and that melody
which make his story neither too sensuous nor ever less
than magical. An older critic may marvel how the
Birmingham chemist, who scarcely knew his England,
and certainly had never left it, save by guide-book, suc-
ceeded in capturing not alone the various atmospheres
of the world of Cavalier and of Puritan and of Laud,

AT WREN'S, 1 889-1 890 69

but of Paris and of Florence, of Naples and of Rome ;
of cultured Cardinal's palazzo, of Jesuit house and Benedic-
tine ; of that strange Italian seventeenth-century life, with
its almost Oriental juxtaposition of splendour and of
squalor. Over all alike he draws one veil of mirage ; the
thing is so living, so solemn, and so sweet, that not a
thousand inaccuracies in detail would buffet one into
acknowledgment that the whole is anything but truthful.

Doubtless it was this sheer vitalism which first won
Benson; it vivified for him this Caroline period with
extraordinary success ; and it is interesting to see how
similar the temper of the two authors must have been
by the similarity in character of what they select to speak
of in their respective books, and to note with what close
affinity (not identity) of point of view they envisage the
life and problems of that age. But there is more than this ;
so much more, in fact, that I shall be forgiven for recalling
the outline of John Inglesant.

Richard Inglesant was a servant of Cromwell, and
visitor of the Priory of Westacre, with which, after its
suppression, he was presented. His son John was an
inquisitive and susceptible child, melancholy too, and at
once sensuous and a student. Already at fourteen he was
a "compleat Platonist," and interpreted the Phaedo. To
the care of Mr. Hall, or Father St. Clare, a Jesuit, Richard
Inglesant entrusted his son, anxious to see him made an
agent of that politico-religious scheme which should bring
the English Church, by a corporate movement, into
communion with the See of Peter. Plato and St. Teresa
sharpen his intellect without blunting his spirit of romance,
and John learns to see the Divine Light shining everywhere
through the created world, but most, through human
nature. He passes through court and camp, and stays

70 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

with Nicholas Ferrar at his " Protestant Nunnery " of
Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire. In Inglesant's life,
the Little Gidding Sacrament-Sunday with its realisation of
the immediate Personality of Christ, and the Jesuits, remain
parallel influences, checking each the other, while Hobbes
and Crashaw develop yet other sides of his rich personality.
With philosophy and poetry, the love of Mary Collet (a
very Beatrice, at Gidding, to this dreamier Dante) models
his soul more even than does downright war undertaken for
King Charles ; though the secret service, loyally rendered,
and cruelly repaid by the king's denial of his messenger,
strengthens profoundly Inglesant's spiritual detachment.
Prison and imminent death and, above all, the assassination
of his brother Eustace, seem to complete his " purification " :
and in Paris he meets Mary Collet once more, but now a
nun. Two paths, therefore, are placed before him — that of
the soul crucified with Jesus amid the splendours of all
pagan and Christian culture, and this the Jesuits preach ;
and that of simple self-surrender to the personal charm
of Jesus, who should be followed in the desert, away from
court or university, or political intrigue : Serenus de
Cressy, the Benedictine, offers him this privilege. He turns
from the monk, sorrowful amid his great possessions.
Plato still, it seemed, should partly govern him ; but still,
and far more certainly, Christ loved the young man.

This servant of the Jesuits went on to Italy and
Rome, with the fixed idea of vengeance on his brother's
murderer more vivid, now, in his mind than ever. At
Florence he meets Lauretta di Visalvo, his destined
wife ; but first he must conquer in her regard that
earthliness of passion which imperils yet further his
ever more clouded ideal. In the wan light of the dawn
he renounces the promised ecstasy of sin; and though

AT WREN'S, 1 889-1 890 71

you are left doubtful what precisely within him won
that victory (for that a temptation fostered by passionate
moonlight should wane when the cold grey morning
blanches away the mystery of things, need mean no
triumph carried off by or within the soul), at least it is
clear that John had thus, at any rate, renounced two
earthly great rewards, once for his king, and now, if
not for God, at least for his spiritual concept of what
Love should be. That scene in the midnight hut is
unsurpassed for lofty human emotion ; for mystical
enchantment, the third renunciation, where John forgives
his brother's murderer, Malvolti, whom he at last
encounters, is supreme.^

When Benson says that John Inglesant influenced him,
he does not merely mean that it vitalised for him the
Caroline period of English history, even of English
ecclesiastical Church history, still less that his description
of the suppressed monasteries in The King's Achievement
is very reminiscent of that at Westacre, and Ralph's
loyalty to Cromwell in the same book, of John's fidelity
to the faithless Charles II ; nor even that the triple
temptation, successfully encountered by Roger, which
we read of in Oddsfish (a book first written at Rome,
before his ordination, and directly under the spell of
John Inglesant) is again reminiscent of Shorthouse's
psychic series. Nor does he even perceive in the
Quaker's sympathetic delineation of Molinos, the source
of much of that orthodox Quietism he himself developed.
Nor, of course, is the interweaving of the preternatural,
and indeed of the elfish and bizarre, with the realistic,
what most of all attracted him in John Inglesant. Even

^ In this episode Shorthouse models himself with great exactness on the story
of San Giovanni Gualberto.

72 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

the creation of the Hare Street colony, so to call it,
realising as it did a dream first conceived after studying
the exquisite interlude of Little Gidding and never
allowed to fade, was not the chief result of the absolute
passion Benson conceived for that romance.

To begin with, its revelation of the Personality of
Jesus Christ came to him literally like the tearing of
veils and the call of a loud trumpet, and a leaning
forth of the Son of God to touch him. The veils swung
back again, and silence was soon once more to swaddle
his soul into inertia; but virtue had gone forth, and
without his realising it, his life would appear to have been
poised around a new axis ; its centre of gravity was
shifted; or, if you will, the notion of the dominancy of
Jesus, having sunk into his subconsciousness, worked
there in silence until in due time it revealed its adult
significance. Flashed upon John during the Com-
munion service at Little Gidding, the full blaze of
revelation shone out for him when the blinded Malvolti,
now a friar, told Inglesant of the spiritual vision which
had reached him.

Since this was one of those pages which Hugh learnt
and kept by heart, as having substantially altered him, I
quote it without apology.

(The murderer of Eustace, you may remember, was
sitting on the Capitol and, in imagination, seeing
the whole of Rome, its churches, its worshippers, its
crucifixes.)

" ' Suddenly it seemed to me that I was conscious of a
general movement and rush of feet, and that a strange
and wild excitement prevailed in every region of Rome.
The churches became empty, the people pouring out
into the streets ; the dead Christs above the altars faded

AT WREN'S, 1889-1890 73

from their cross, and the sacred tapers went out of their
own accord ; for it spread through Rome, as in a moment,
that a miracle had happened at the Ara Coeli, and that
the living Christ was come. From where I stood I could
see the throngs of people pouring through every street and
lane, and thronging up to the Campidoglio and the stairs ;
and from the distance in the pale Campagna, from St.
Paolo without the walls, and from subterranean Rome,
where the martyrs and confessors lie, I could see strange
and mystic shapes come sweeping in through the brilliant
light.

" ' He came down the steps of the Ara Coeli, and the
sky was full of starlike forms, wonderful and gracious ;
and all the steps of the Capitol were full of those people
down to the square of the Ara Coeli, and up to the statue
of Aurelius on horseback above; and the summit of the
Capitol among the statues, and the leads of the Palace
Caffarelli, were full of eager forms ; for the starlight was
so clear that all might see ; and the dead gods, and the
fauns, and the satyrs, and the old pagans, that lurked in
the secret hiding-places of the ruins of the Caesars,
crowded up the steps out of the Forum, and came round
the outskirts of the crowd, and stood on the Forum pillars
that they might see. And Castor and Pollux, that stood
by their unsaddled horses at the top of the stairs, left
them unheeded and came to see ; and the Marsyas who
stood bound broke his bonds and came to see ; and
spectral forms swept in from the distance in the light,
and the air was full of Powers and Existences, and the
earth rocked as at the Judgment Day.

"'He came down the steps into the Campidoglio, and
He came to me. He was not at all like the pictures of
the Saints ; for He was pale, and worn and thin, as though

74 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

the fight was not yet half over — ah no ! — but through this
pale and worn look shone infinite power, and undying
love, and unquenchable resolve. The crowd fell back on
every side, but when He came to me He stopped. ' Ah ! '
He said, 'is it thou? What doest thou here? Knowest
thou not that thou art Mine ? Thrice Mine — Mine centuries
ago when I hung upon the Cross on Calvary for such as
thou — Mine years ago, when thou camest a little child to
the font — Mine once again, when, forfeit by every law,
thou wast given over to Me by one who is a servant and
friend of Mine. Surely, I will repay.' As He spoke, a
shudder and a trembling ran through the crowd, as if
stirred by the breath of His voice. Nature seemed to rally
and to grow beneath Him, and Heaven to bend down to
touch the earth. A healing sense of health and comfort,
like the gentle dew, visited the weary heart. A great cry
and shout arose from the crowd, and He passed on ; but
among ten thousand times ten thousand I should know
Him, and amid the tumult of a universe I should hear
the faintest whisper of His voice.' "

Upon this apparition in Hugh's life of a new trans-
forming force we will make no comment, content with
having registered it. Of a different character, but as
important on its plane, was the conclusion reached by
Inglesant in his travel of religious exploration. He was
led to it, as a matter of fact, through the Platonism by
which he had been encountered from childhood up — in its
more pious forms with the Rosicrucian vicar of Ashley,
in its more strictly intellectual, but also practical, aspect
with St. Clare, and in its artistic and worldly and Re-
naissance presentation with the Cardinal at Rome, John's
conversations with whom are, philosophically speaking,
among the quite most fascinating pages of the book. Now

AT WREN'S, 1 889-1 890 js

Platonism as Platonism made no sort of scholarly appeal
to Hugh Benson : but its central and unchanging dogma
was, the immersion of the Idea in matter, the shivering
of the One into many, the expression of the Immutable
Reality in shifting finite forms, illusory and dreamlike all
of them ; the reflection, finally, of the Absolute by the
relative. Thus both John's Christianity and his Platonism
conspired to make him see the world as itself something
of a Sacrament — better, even, than the veiled Tabernacle,
where the Godhead lurked within — in which the Ultimate
God immediately conveyed and concealed Himself ; not
a veil merely, to hide the Ubiquitous, but a robe making
visible the Unseen. Now both to Inglesant and to Hugh
Benson the question propounded itself. How, in this
world of mystery, where words belie the thought, and
thought itself betrays the Word it would translate, can I
know what the "true truth" is ? Inglesant confessed that
Christianity, having brought "sublimest Platonism down
to the humblest understanding," had thereby been forced
to reduce "its spiritual and abstract truth to hard and
inadequate dogma." If, then, you cannot accept the
dogma, acknowledge, he proclaimed, that "Absolute
Truth is not revealed at all." Either Rome is right, or,
whatever else of a theory may be devised, it must start
from this, the non-revelation of final and universal Truth.
** There is only one answer to the Papist argument —
Absolute Truth is not revealed." Are we, then, to resign
ourselves to pure Agnosticism ? Is our soul to be for ever
tormented by the surmise that the Light reaches it so
broken, refracted, tinted, that perhaps this very light is
darkness ? No, urges Inglesant ; within the soul is a
fons vert lucidus ; " in Thy light shall we see light " ; the
conscience can test, in my individual soul's case at least,

76 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

the value of what I seem to see. The Kingdom of God
within me shall echo its Emperor's voice, reaching it from
outside, if indeed it be His voice. . . . Benson, without
knowing it, was already rejecting this spiritual individual-
ism. The dilemma was already dimly presenting itself
to him as it did to Inglesant. Either an Infallible
Authority, speaking unmistakably in the ears of the
multitude, or the guidance of the conscience, which, left
to itself, means no more nor less than agnosticism with
regard to the universal issues. He too was accepting the
world and the Church as sacramental ; and he was re-
fusing to regard the veils and vestures of their Inhabitant
as mere illusion, and to be discarded, because mere veils
and vestures ; rather they were elevated to His plane and
quality, and of indescribably high import, because they
were His.

Inglesant, after expounding his philosophy, sits brood-
ing over Worcester bathed in sunset.

"The sun, which was just setting behind the distant
hills, shone with dazzling splendour for a moment upon
the towers and spires of the city across the placid water.
Behind this fair vision were dark rain-clouds, before which
gloomy background it stood in fairy radiance and light.
For a moment it seemed a glorious city bathed in life
and hope, full of happy people who thronged its streets
and bridge and the margin of its gentle stream. But it
was breve gaudium. Then the sunset faded, and the
ethereal vision vanished, and the landscape lay dark and
chill.

"'The sun is set,' Mr. Inglesant said cheerfully, 'but
it will rise again. Let us go home. ' "

Here was a symbol for Benson. He sought a sun
which should not set, and a City on a hill which might

AT WREN'S, 1 889-1 890 77

never disappear. Plato's Republic was an "ensample in
the sky," the attainment of which might be hazarded by a
few, and achieved by fewer still. Hugh would demand
that the Word should be made flesh and pitch His tent
for evermore amongst us ; and that, having taken human
nature. He should never again, in any human relationship,
lay it aside. But both these spiritual experiences, of
the Personality of Jesus, and of the need of His living,
infallible voice, speaking Truth in a visionary world,
took place in, or disappeared at once into, the deeper
places of his consciousness ; and, for a while, you might
have thought nothing had happened to him at all.

Yet I seem to see, in this else sterile year in London,
the sowing of a seed destined to grow into a tree where
his whole life will take shelter. Or rather, here is conceived
that life itself, to remain unborn yet for a long period.

CHAPTER IV
CAMBRIDGE

A peine dixhuit printemps ont-ils epanoui nos annees, que nous souffrons
de d^sirs qui n'ont pour objet ni la chair, ni I'amour, ni la gloire, ni rien qui
ait une forme ou un nom. Le jeune homme se sent oppress^ d'aspirations sans
but : il s'eloigne des r^alit^s de la vie comme d'une prison ou le coeur dtoufife.

Lacordaire.

Hugh Benson went up to Cambridge in the October of
1890 under very happy auspices. Not only he found, at
Trinity, a large circle of Eton acquaintances, but his
father and elder brother and more than one of his uncles
had been there before him, and it may be said without
exaggeration that his lot had fallen to him in a ground
exceptionally fair.

Not that the immediate setting in which he found
himself was in the least attractive. The name of Trinity
is by most associated with its enormous court, irregular in
shape and ornament, with its chapel to the right, its
canopied fountain perennially pouring slender streams in
the midst of the wide pavements, its heavy arches to right
and left, and its superb gateway. But Trinity, having
outgrown itself, overleaps the road, and there is a melan-
choly building to the east containing Whewell's Court,
where Hugh had rooms. The rooms are in the angle,
and their windows give upon All Saints Passage and
Bridge Street respectively, gloomy windows, high up,
splashed with mud, and, in the interests of conversation,
kept for the most part closed. From time to time the bad

lighting depressed Hugh, and perhaps he had no heart, as

78

CAMBRIDGE ' 79

well as too undeveloped a taste, to trouble about furnish-
ing his rooms fastidiously.

Professor R. Bosanquet, now of Liverpool, whose
assistance has been of great value to me in the forma-
tion of my mental picture of Hugh during these years,
had rooms near his in Whewell's Court, and renewed a
friendship inaugurated at Eton the more easily because
Hugh, already installed, put his rooms at his friend's dis-
posal until his own effects should be arranged. Hugh
struck Mr. Bosanquet as being much developed and older
for the months spent in travel and at Wren's since he
left Eton ; " though to the end his face and manner were
those of an impulsive boy." Hugh was still full of his
experiences in Switzerland, and was by now winning his
friends' attention by his delightful powers of conversation,
a special charm he will never lose, but which had remained
latent, I need not say, at Eton, though even there a certain
volubility and a flexibility of expression belied the orthodox
reticence and the mask. Traces, however, of shyness still
remained, and only with his more intimate friends would
he discuss, with infectious humour, the varied types and
characters to be met in a large College. Already he loved
to make acquaintances whom he might study, and he led
them on, in conversation, to the revealing of some chink
in their conventional armour through which his quick
imagination might pierce beneath the surface. Nor were
his investigations confined to Trinity. By great good
fortune he found doors open to him at King's, where his
brother, Mr. E. F. Benson, lived in a circle where both
dons and undergraduates joined in an intimacy then per-
haps less usual than it seems to-day. There were two
societies in particular of which Hugh soon found himself
a member : one was a King's and Trinity literary society

8o ROBERT HUGH BENSON

called the Chit-chat, of which I find no records ; * the other
was rather more artistic in tendency, and was called the
T.A.F. because it met Twice A Fortnight — in fact, each
Sunday evening.^ Its meetings were inaugurated by certain
venerable gaieties. The host, Prof. Bosanquet assures me,

"was expected to provide certain traditional cold dishes
and a reasonable quantity of hock, and it was an agree-
able custom that the guests on their arrival should view
the table with melancholy faces and murmur audibly that
there seemed to be nothing to eat. Some of the party
were excellent actors, and much of the chaff that went
on through supper was conducted in the assumed voices
of certain well-known characters. Afterwards we ad-
journed to one of the larger sets of rooms in Fellows'
Buildings, as often as not M. R. James's,^ where there was
music and more serious talk, frequently of French cathe-
drals, illuminated manuscripts, the lives of obscure saints
and other mediaeval lore. In those years Mr. James was
full of the reconstruction of the library and church of
the Monastery of St. Edmund at Bury, an intricate piece
of research which he published in 1895, and I have no
doubt that the talks in which he sketched the life of that
great House, familiar to him from boyhood, furnished
some of the colour which Hugh was to use so skilfully
when he came to write of the mediaeval Church." *

Other men of note then at King's beside Mr. Montague
James, were Marcus Dimsdale, Walter Headlam, and for
a time J. K. Stephen, whose unforgettably brilliant career,
with its melancholy close, is sympathetically traced by
Mr. A. C. Benson in The Leaves of the Tree.

^ Mr, A. C. Benson, indeed, thinks that this society, from which the
" Apostles " were largely recruited, was then extinct. It is said to have been
highly stimulating. Absolute candour was exacted of all who spoke at it.

* This society occurs in Mr. E. F. Benson's story, The Babe B.A. I will
leave ingenious readers to surmise what traits Hugh Benson supplied to that
composite photograph. Or shall I mention one . . . ? The Babe could cause a
carved piece of orange peel to display, with hideous accuracy, certain episodes
proper to a Channel crossing. So could Hugh.

* Now Provost * Probably not least in The King's Achievement.

CAMBRIDGE >; ^i

At the suggestion of one of the editors, an Etonian,
Hugh began to write in the Trident, a Trinity magazine, and
already, in December 1890, produced a poem there, " From
the Heights," an ordinary piece of versification, and rather
melancholy. Death, memory, tears, and sunset were
the topics of this composition, which was far surpassed
in the June of 1891 by "De Profundis," the quite pathetic
soliloquy of a dog left chained by his master to the rail-
ings of the Pitt Club, at the mercy of the weather and
of the messengers who waited there. Much rain, many
kicks, hope long deferred, could not quench the terrier's
love for the godlike youth who spent heedless hours
inside, and rewarded patience with a pat.* He wrote a
little, too, in the Cambridge Review, reviews of books, for
instance, notably of his brother Fred's first novel, Dodo,
though this did not appear till 1893, and created a sucds
de surprise, not least among those who realised how much
the circumstances of its writing (it was composed at
Cambridge and on the shores of the Gulf of Corinth, in
the interstices of time left by the elaboration of a disserta-
tion) gave it the character of a literary tour de force as
well as of a social bomb.

Hugh, on returning after one vacation, announced that
he had read Dodo in MS. He was asked what he thought
of it. " Well," he replied, " it's very wo-wo-wo-worldly ! "

Hugh wrote, too, a long poem in blank verse called
"Thor's Hammer," which appeared in the Leisure Hour,

^ In College, where dogs were forbidden, Hugh was one of the few who kept
a cat, which, Mr. Marshall says, he called a kitten. The criticism that it was
responsible for a certain haunting aroma, he met by flatly denying the alleged
fact. Later on, he exclaims in a letter to a friend : " Cats I respect deeply,
and have loved several : a white one with a sandy tail and an abscess in its
ear ; an ash-coloured Persian with orange eyes and hairy ears and toes ; " and
actually wrote to a sick penitent : " I am so sorry about the pain you are
suffering, but am delighted that the cat is a bright spot." See Vol. II, p. 148.

I F

82 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

and another poem called " Iduna," which I cannot find.
Tennyson, I should say, influenced their style; a story
written in conjunction with his sister, which earned him
£t, IDS., in February 1891, from the Monthly Packet will
have been more original.

More than this, he wrote a satiric poem, in the style
of Pope, entitled, "A Scandal in High Life," dealing with
some undergraduate freak of insubordination. The men
involved were youths of destined importance in their
country, and resented the sarcasm. Inquiry failed, how-
ever, to discover the author.

He and Mr. Marshall shared their literary ambitions,

or rather, thought that it would be nice to write stories
and get money for them. We did write a joint one, and
I have the manuscript somewhere still. It was a very
poor story, but contained a few gleams of observation. It
must have been a year or so after this that Hugh finished
a novel, and it was a very bad novel, ending up with the
violent death of all the chief characters. I said that this
scene was not led up to in any way, and therefore missed
fire. Hugh said that it was a very effective scene, and
therefore couldn't miss fire. But the novel was never
published. Looking back, it seems to me that both of us
showed exceptionally small promise in those days of ever
doing anything with fiction. I think that Hugh's first im-
pulse came from the necessity that it was for him always
to be doing something with a pen. Later on, he plunged
deeply into life, and his craftsmanship fitted itself to his
knowledge.^

Already, however, an ingenious story-teller (he always
recast the plots of the books he read), he used to beguile
long walks by a system which he will still make use of
when in Rome. He would start a story, develop it with
extreme rapidity for a certain number of minutes, break
off abruptly, and leave his companion to continue it. He

* Ike Cornhill Magazine, Feb. 191 5.

CAMBRIDGE 83

loved, moreover, improvised acting, though he never
played a part more serious than that of a member of the
chorus in the Ion of Euripides.^ Mr. A. C. Benson says
that he was a keen debater (the debating club was
called the Decemviri), but I cannot find his name down
as speaking (and only once, I think, as present) at the
College debates, in so far, at least, as I have found their
records, for these years, in the Trident. Not that this
implied, as you may well imagine, that he was slack in
the defence of his own view. But even then, his debates
tended ever towards the intolerant ; the rival argument
must be interrupted; the thesis must be started from a
dogma.

" I can see him," writes Mr. Ronald Norman, a close
friend of Hugh's, "in his rooms in the Great Court at
Trinity, plucking ceaselessly at his chin with fingers
stained with (too much) cigarette-smoking, as he strove
with his stammer to break into an argument which was
going against his views, and now and then exploding into
a short laugh."

As for athletics, "he steered the third Trinity boat
all the time he was at Cambridge, and was a member of
the Leander Club, and displayed no symptoms of nerves."
At golf, other freshmen found him to be an expert. He
played for some time regularly on the Coldham Common,
railed furiously at the background of drab brick houses
which made it impossible, he urged, to play golf in the
proper spirit. . . . Not just the game, it will be surmised,
was paramount in this artist's unconcentrated thought.
Still, golf had a value wider than itself.

" Allow me to congratulate you," a friend wrote in May
1891, "on the fact that you have at last succeeded in

* It was in 1892 that he played the r61e of a retired tradesman's daughter in
a charade, Covmtry, of which quaint drawings still remain in a little note-book.

84 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

addressing a letter to me quite correctly — no mean achieve-
ment for an erratic-minded literary man ! Secondly, allow
me to congratulate you on the fact that your latest craze
is a healthy and sporting one, which has my sympathies
more than mesmerising."

Of this latter pursuit I speak more at length below.
Besides this, we hear that in the summer of 1892 he was
much on the Upper River, an inexhaustibly talkative
companion in long canoe expeditions, and a furious and
rather reckless performer in a variety of water polo then
popular at Trinity, which was played in canoes, and
always ended in the whole of both teams being upset
into the water.

In this connection there is little else to mention save
his love of walking, which led him quite far afield — to
Ely, for instance, and Saffron Walden. His brother has
related 1 how he and Hugh, one winter, went for a walk-
ing tour in Yorkshire, in pursuit of the " origins " of the
Benson family. They went from Pately Bridge by way
of Ripon, Bolton Abbey, and Ripley to York, "the
thermometer falling lower and lower every day in
sympathy with (their) researches." For though they
traced their family tree back to the fourteenth century,
they considered the earlier estate of their ancestors too
undistinguished to provoke enthusiasm. However, Hugh
wrote to his father at considerable length on the subject.
He would climb, too, with his brothers, in Switzerland,
and was found by them to be "agile, quick, sure-footed,
and entirely intrepid." A really serious accident was
experienced by them near Pontresina, without a single
member of the party having broken the silence by so
much as an exclamation . . . and once, on the Piz Palu

^ In Hugh, p. 62.

CAMBRIDGE 85

in the Engadine, Hugh's heart suffered a sharp attack
after a long cHmb from midnight to 8 o'clock. Reduced
as he was by training in order to steer his boat at
Cambridge, he did not revive when dosed with brandy,
and his brother believed him dead. To all appearances
unconscious, his soul was in reality perfectly aware. He
thought himself, no doubt, dying, and speculated on
what phenomenon of the supernatural would first meet
his gaze. The snowy peaks suggested the Great White
Throne. . . . Yet neither fear nor hope, nor other
emotion, kindled his soul. He assigns this, in his
Confessions, to the general atrophy of his religious sense
at that time. I doubt this explanation. In most cases
where the senses have been numbed, but consciousness
of some deep sort has survived, the patient, on recovery,
speaks of the lack of interest with which he has con-
templated the events occurring to or round his person,
and the seemingly alien character assumed by his body,
and even by his more superficially spiritual faculties.
This apparent disintegration of the personality and loss
of interest in one of its parts by the other, does not seem
connected with modes of previous behaviour.

His walking efforts culminated in a tramp which he
attempted from Cambridge to London. Its incidents
were sufficiently characteristic to warrant my quoting at
some length from a letter of Professor Bosanquet, his
companion :

About this time some of our friends revived what had
once been a common practice, and walked up to London.
I was somewhat surprised when Hugh told me, one day
towards the end of the term, that he intended to do the
same, and named a day. I knew that he was good for
twenty miles, but this was a matter of fifty or more, and
the time was too short for training. Some one else was

86 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

to have gone with him, but the arrangement fell through,
and almost at the last moment I agreed to go with him
and stay the night at Lambeth, though I doubted whether
either of us could stay the distance. He was tremendously
in earnest, and I think excitement kept him awake most
of the previous night. I remember his keen enjoyment
of the early breakfast, which we cooked ourselves, and his
confidence, which no warnings could shake, in a pair of
Alpine boots by a noted maker, which were to carry him
in triumph to Lambeth. We were off at five, had a
second breakfast at Royston, and all went well until we
halted for lunch in a village whose name I have long for-
gotten. I can still see the sanded tap-room where Hugh
removed one of his boots and disclosed a galled heel, and
the elderly tramp, our fellow-guest, who prescribed a pad
of brown paper and fitted it himself. The Alpine boots
were our undoing. After another two hours Hugh was
going really lame, but it never occurred to him to give in.
Somewhere south of Ware I persuaded him to take my
arm, and he stumped along, still perfectly cheerful, buoyed
up by the increasing number of houses and gas lamps
which deceitfully suggested that we were nearing the out-
skirts of London. We were only at the tip of one of those
tentacle suburbs which fringe the main roads for many
miles before real town begins. The pace became slower,
and I had to get him some brandy, and then decided that
if he attempted more he might make himself really ill.
Beaten in body, but still unbroken in spirit, he was per-
suaded to get into the train at a station called Ponders
End, and slept all the way to Liverpool Street. We had
sent our bags on to Lambeth, and had a very kind welcome
when we arrived there late at night. Hugh was able to
dissemble his lameness, and the Archbishop's principal
concern was for the levity with which we had passed a
series of interesting churches without pausing to study
their architecture. His surprise is recorded in his pub-
lished diary.

That was the first of several visits which showed me
something of the bracing atmosphere in which Hugh had
grown up.

Neither the climbing nor the tramp to London were for-
gotten by Hugh Benson, or left unused, when he began
to draw upon his experience for his work. The Alpine

CAMBRIDGE 87

scenery, observed, so to say, from above, is introduced
with superb realism into The Lord of the World, and the
mechanical technicalities, no less than the more psycho-
logical concomitants of a climb, into the Coward. As for
the tramp, it is worked, with much accuracy of detail, into
the novel, which introduces, too, no little of Cambridge
background, and even of Trinity itself. None Other Gods.
There it is Guiseley who takes to the unaccustomed road,
and it is Guiseley's foot that suffers ; and the suffering
is as magnified as the tramp.

Hugh was led to King's by yet another influence. He
resented strongly the lack of music upon most week-days
in Trinity, having been used for years to the inspiring
daily service of Eton. It is true that he enjoyed to the
full what he called " square shouting hymns," sung by the
whole congregation ; but he appreciated already a better
music, and in most of his letters to the Archbishop occurs
the name of the anthem he last had heard. With Mr.
Crabtree, now of Sunningdale, one of the very few among
his earlier acquaintances with whom I can discover Hugh
to have kept up any kind of correspondence, he used to
spend much time in various organ lofts, at Cambridge,
or at Lambeth. Hugh even travelled after music as far
as Ely. His performances were not wonderful, but they
witnessed to a remarkable natural instinct, as I shall
indicate below. When, after the lapse of many years, Mr.
Crabtree called on Hugh at Hare Street, he was at first
taken for the tax-collector. Hugh, when he recognised
his identity, became charming, and for the last time
the friends played together on Hugh's little American
organ. But, rather as his golf suffered from unkind sur-
roundings, so did his music. The chapel at Trinity was
decorated at an unfortunate moment, and he fled from

88 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

its heavy gilded carvings to the soaring architecture of
King's. Eton had been but a preHminary hint of all this
splendour. Even so, he needed a touch of the dramatic.
In the evening, the ante-chapel, where he sat, was almost
wholly dark, and the great loft and organ were silhouetted
against the radiance streaming upward from the choir.
From this side and from that, processions entered, meeting
in the middle. Doors opened and then shut ; curtains
were drawn ; the white-robed ministers had passed into
the unseen melodious " Paradise," and Hugh remained
ecstatically in the dark. Trained by Lis Escop, Lambeth,
Eton, and King's, he will never quite tolerate a roodless
chapel, and in the tiny shrine at Hare Street, he will re-
establish the division ; only there, it will be he who will
kneel, half seen, inside the rood.

A visit made by him to Bayreuth, some months later
on, is instructive here. He was asked by some friends to
accompany them to a Wagner festival there, and wrote
enthusiastically to thank his father for allowing him to
accept :

I am so very grateful to you for allowing me to go to
Bayreuth and for your long letter — I shall enjoy the opera
most enormously — in its literal sense — I have never yet
heard one.^

He arrived after a fatiguing journey, of which crude
reminiscences survive in his sketch-book, and went straight
that afternoon to Parsifal? But what remains with him

^ From more than this one instance I gather that the Archbishop, to whom
Hugh wrote letters of a somewhat propitiatory character, had been fond of
insisting on the exact etymological value of the word enormous.

* If he kept to his original programme of hearing five operas only, he can
never have assisted at the Ring, at anyrate in its entirety ; for he certainly heard
Tannhduser and the Meisiersinger, and perhaps (since he chooses them for
description in Loneliness) Tristan and Lohengrin.

CAMBRIDGE 89

of this opera (the only one he dwells on in his letters), is
in the main an ecclesiastical stage eifect.i

"We arrived here yesterday," he wrote to his father,
"and went to Parsifal in the afternoon. I have never
been so moved by music in all my life — it was absolutely
glorious. Do you know the story ? In the last act all comes
right, and there is a final ' Love Feast ' of the knights.
Parsifal lifts the Grail and the Spear, which grow redder
and redder, and all the knights hide their heads while the
Dove descends from the dome, where one hears a choir
singing the Grail Motive, the Dresden Amen. I have
never seen anything like it in all my life — it is really the
most magnificent thing I have ever seen. I am so very
grateful to you for letting me go."

To Professor Bosanquet he writes in almost identical
words, and then proceeds :

The heat at this place is something more frantic than
you can have any conception of. One regularly has two
cold baths every day — one in the morning and one before
the opera, besides a permanent hot bath all the time. The

S s are most delightful people to travel with, with

proper ideas of comfort — such as sitting in about one

farment and a half and smoking all the time, also many
ibbings of iced liquor and large meals under awnings —
at all hours of the day.

We stayed at Ratisbon on Sunday last and went to
the Cathedral there — gorgeous ^ Gregorian services and
ceremonies.

I must stop — the charred pen is falling from limp
fingers, and I am sitting with my feet in warm water, part
of myself. — Ever yours, Hugh Benson.

Whether he became, ultimately, at home in the tumul-
tuous universe of Wagner, we may perhaps have an
opportunity of judging later on.

^ I am interested to find, after writing this, that he declared, quite late in
life, that he could make nothing of Parsifal: as music, it was quite " above " him.

^ "Gorgeous," a correspondent of that date has written to me, "was a
favourite word of his."

90 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Music lifted him above mere matter. Quite early in his
Cambridge career he turned with zest to spiritualism, still,
however, more as a sport than out of any real psychical
necessity.

'< In his early undergraduate days," a close friend of
his has written to me, "he got two rustics into his rooms
and proceeded to hypnotise them one after the other,
telling each in turn before he was roused that he was not
to remember what had happened ; and he afterwards
thoroughly enjoyed the laugh each had at the other.
But the matter came, I believe, to the ears of the
authorities, who prohibited the further indulgence in this
taste. I recollect that once in the Long, when he was going
off after Hall one night with three others to * read ' in the
rooms of one (I am afraid on most occasions the reading
did not last very long), the conversation happened to turn
on crystal-gazing, and nothing would satisfy him but
that we should all four stand in different corners of the
room gazing into a glass of water (the nearest approach
to a crystal that could be improvised) until, greatly to Hugh's
disgust, a loud laugh from one of the party put an end to
the performance. I also recollect one afternoon in a May
week his insisting, after lunch in his room, on darkening
the room and our sitting with our hands on the table
waiting developments, and his indignation when the in-
evitable happened, and some of us set to work to get the
table going."

" I was present," writes Professor Bosanquet, " at one
of these thought-reading performances ; so far as I can
remember, half a dozen of us in one room were told to
focus our thoughts on the weather-cock of the University
Church, and after a time the medium, in the next room,
was aware of a cow perched on a steeple. He read some
of the older magical literature and was interested in
Dr. Dee, an early fellow of the College ; but I cannot be
sure whether an article on Dee's occult experiences, which
appeared in the Trident, the College magazine, for December
1891, was Hugh's own work or some one else's." ^

* I gather it was not Hugh's.

CAMBRIDGE 91

He told his mother about this, and she of her greater

experience earnestly dissuaded him from making further

practical experiments :

Lambeth Palace,
Feb. 17, 1891.

Oh, please don't go playing tricks with hypnotism.
(And I said Oh, please !) It is a deadly thing, and ought,
I am sure, to be taken up scientifically or not at all. And
for goodness gracious sake, not now, when your work is
so important. It is very exhausting — I know this in so
many ways. Tries nerves and exhausts brain. Do leave it
alone for the present. It's quite a question of " afterwards "
and as much eye-winking as ever you can do.

Lambeth Palace,
March 20, 1 89 1.

About mesmerism. ... I still feel strongly that at pre-
sent it isn't the time for you to follow out a subject so
engrossing as one of this kind is — and I shouldn't feel
happy at your doing it without talking it out with your
father. . . .

It would be difficult to deny that there was a touch at
least of morbidity in his instinct for the occult.

It is in a letter to his father that we first find the casual
mention, inserted between quite alien topics, of an event
which left a practical effect on his stay at Cambridge.

June I.

I am getting on well in my work, I think — Dr. Verrall
tells me I am making progress. I am reading the De Corond
with my Coach — I do not find it so hard as I expected.

An awful thing happened in Trinity last night — a man
shot himself, apparently from overwork at night, and was
found dead yesterday morning by some one whom he had
asked to breakfast.

To convince his father, perhaps, that he was not
morbidly affected by this event, he added some sentences
on everyday topics, so callous-sounding that I omit them.
He was not callous, but, certainly, unawakened ; and when
no one would take the suicide's rooms, which were in
Bishop's Hostel, again outside Great Court, Hugh im-

92 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

mediately applied for them, to the anger of several of
his friends, and slept for some time in a room where a
bloodstain marked the boards and a bullet had pierced the
panel. He sincerely hoped to enter into some sort of com-
munication with the soul who there had made the tremen-
dous choice, and had preferred to have done with life.

By 1893 his interest in the less trodden among spiritual
paths has passed from occultism to mysticism, and he was
plunged in Swedenborg.

He informed his father of this new interest, and the
Archbishop, with true respect of freedom, tolerated and
even furthered it.

" I have been reading," Hugh wrote, " some more of
Swedenborg's books. A great deal of them is extraordinarily
clever ; but one of the things that I cannot believe is that
he denies the immortality of animals."

The Archbishop lent him two books on Swedenborg,
which he handed on to his sister Maggie — Hugh was at
this time ill, and not allowed to get up, and excuses his
"extraordinarily dull and short" letter by the fact that
he has " nothing to describe or write about."

All these pursuits, however, were merely incidental to,
or at best by-products of his way of life. To begin with,
indeed, it looked as if that life were to be even less purpose-
ful than that of Eton. True, he was observed to "walk
fast " and " always to look busy " ; but when his brother
asked him what he did in that dark room in Whewell's
Court, he answered, " Heaven knows ! As far as I can
remember, I mostly sat up late at night and played cards."
Though it is true that he was never in a gambling set
properly so called, he spent, Mr. Arthur Benson recalls,
a good deal of money, and though his allowance was
generous, a financial crisis concluded his first year, and

CAMBRIDGE 93

his mother paid his debts. He had entertained a great
deal, and the Trinity kitchen was, I understand, at that
time expensive. From time to time, however, he violently
economised.

Too much that is characteristic (I do not say of Hugh
only) would be lost if I refrained from requoting a letter
from the Archbishop to his son, already to be found in
Hugh :

Addington Park, Croydon,
26th January 1891.

Dearest Hughie, — I was rather disturbed to hear
that you imagined that what I said in October about not
needlessly indulging was held by you to forbid your having
a fire in your bedroom on the ground floor in the depth
of such a winter as we have had !

You ought to have a fire lighted at such a season at
eight o'clock, so as to warm and dry the room and all in it,
nearly every evening ; and whenever the room seems
damp, have a fire just lighted to go out when it will. It's
not wholesome to sleep in heated rooms, but they must
be dry. A bed slept in every night keeps so, if the room
is not damp ; but the room must not be damp, and when
it is unoccupied for two or three days, it is sure to get so.

Be sure that there is a good fire in it all day, and all
your bed things, mattress and all, kept well before it for
at least a whole day before you go back from Uncle Henry's.

How was it your bed-maker had not your room well
warmed and dried, mattress dry, &c., before you went up
this time ? She ought to have had, and should be spoken
to about it — i.e. unless you told her not to ! in which case it
would be very like having no breakfast !

It has been a horrid interruption in the beginning of
term — and you'll have difficulty with the loss of time.
Besides which I have no doubt you have been very
uncomfortable.

But I don't understand why you should have " nothing
to write about " because you have been in bed. Surely
you must have accumulated all sorts of reflective and
imaginative stories there.

It is most kind of Aunt Nora and Uncle Henry — give
my love and thanks to both.

94 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

I grieve to say that many more fish are found dead
since the thaw melted the banks of swept snow off the sides
of the ice. It is most piteous ; the poor things seem to
have come to the edge where the water is shallowest —
there is a shoal where we generally feed the swans.

I am happy to say the goldfish seem all alive and merry.
The continual dropping of fresh water has no doubt saved
them — they were never hermetically sealed in like the other
poor things.

Yesterday I was at Ringwould, near Dover. The far-
mers had been up all night saving their cattle in the stalls
from the sudden floods.

Here we have not had any, though the earth is washed
very much from the hills in streaks.

We are — at least I am — dreadfully sorry to go to London;
though the house is very dull without " the boys."

All right about the books. — Ever your loving father,

Edw. Cantuar.

The first shock to his easy-going existence occurred
quite early in his stay at Cambridge. It was the death of
his elder sister Nellie. It occurred in October 1890, of
diphtheria ; and Mr. A. C. Benson has written, in a preface
to her novel. At Sundry Times and in Divers Manners y of
her communicative personality and her devotion to human
needs in Lambeth.^ She too, it may be gathered, had that
readiness for self-oblation so strangely mingled with a
marked need of literary self-expression which in Hugh
took its peculiar but very developed form. It may be
rare that the apostle and the artist are united in one
personality. Yet this too the Archbishop handed down.
The last reports from Addington had been good, and thus
intensified the shock.

" On Sunday night," Professor Bosanquet wrote to his
father at the time, " the T.A.F. met in Benson's rooms,
and both the brothers seemed very cheerful ; then on

^ The Archbishop also wrote a memoir in her book, Streets and Lanes of
the City, which was privately primed.

CAMBRIDGE 95

Monday morning came the telegram, ' much worse,' and I
walked with Hugh to King's to find his brother, and they
went, only to find that she had died. I heard from Hugh
this morning. It is a terrible blow — she was so strong and
so clever." " When he returned " (he adds), " one saw that
his world had grown dark. He spoke more freely of his
family and home life, and revealed a most tender and affec-
tionate nature. Hard hit as he was, he said that his wound
was light in comparison with his elders, and spoke especially
of his brother Arthur — she was nearest to him in age."

Professor Bosanquet undoubtedly regards Hugh's char-
acter as having been, if not altered, at least somewhat
developed by this grave shock. I should like to believe
that it was so. It would be pleasant to see in Hugh, too,
something of a Parsifal, dutch Mitleid wissend. Even
though the first sorrow seems to sink beneath the surface
of the soul and vanish, yet in the recesses of subconscious-
ness it survives and is operative.^ It is, however, wholly
true that Hugh very rarely indeed looked backwards : he
never brooded; lingering melancholy was ; alien to his
temperament. Again, too, and again we shall have to
emphasize that singular layer of hardness which crossed
his character, which he so often vehemently recognised,
and which some of his admirers so hotly controvert.

Be that as it may, about half-way through his time at
Cambridge, or even earlier, he definitely turned his atten-
tion from classics to theology in view of possible ordination.

" It is quite true," he wrote in a letter, unfortunately
undated, to his elder brother, " about the theology, and I
feel almost certain that I shall take orders. I think it is a
thing about which one cannot possibly make up one's mind
until a comparatively long time has passed, and one is still
therefore of the same opinion ; but I feel as certain as
possible so far.

* Himself, Hugh thought that his mind was perhaps turned by this death
towards ordination.

96 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

"I like the work far better than the classics, about
which I was never really keen. I had such an enormous
quantity of ground to pick up, and it was altogether un-
satisfactory.

" Papa suggested it to me just before I went back to
Cambridge, but as you know, I had been thinking of it for
some time previously — for about a year, in fact. ... I have
no cigarette case, and I think I should like it above every-
thing."

It is quite true that his success in classics was not
marked. One translation paper of his which survives
provoked ferocious recriminations :

" One might fancy," wrote the angry examiner, " you
had never heard of Tiberius. This is a ver^ bad mistake ;
you see you do not stop to consider at all kozv your transla-
tion is to come out of the words. You must be more careful
if you are to get on."

Certainly Hugh's slapdash method was peculiarly suited
to annoy a scholarly-minded professor.

Still, even when he had shifted his rooms to those in
the Great Court, he was still working under Dr. Verrall,
who, if anyone, should have been able to fire the imagina-
tion, and even the fancifulness, of his pupil had the classics
ever been destined to mean anything to him. He writes
to his father, with that odd boylike tone which will cling to
him in his correspondence with the Archbishop, even after
he has left the University :

Dr. Verrall has given me some very nice rooms in the
Great Court — they are panelled and are on the ground floor
— Letter I. Facing the Hall. They are on the Lecture
Room staircase, which is a slight drawback, though not
nearly as much as I had thought. It makes it entirely
necessary to keep sported all the morning, as otherwise one
would be so disturbed by men going to and from Lectures.
I thanked Dr. Verrall very much for his trouble.

CAMBRIDGE 97

In October 1891, then, he begins Theology, and is rather
startled at having to undertake Hebrew ; but proposes to
" do Hebrew more than anything " that term. He also
goes to lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, and to
Professor Gwatkin's on Church History. He enjoys this
a great deal more than classics, and repeatedly emphasizes
this point. He also undertakes the Third Book of Eusebius
and Textual Criticism and New Testament Grammar, and
his father sends him an Analysis of St. Mark. And in July,
1892, he is reading Essays upon the Synoptic Gospels, and
writes : " Might I have the book you said you would lend
me ? I should be very grateful for it." In his next letter
he says : " Many thanks also for the book on Roman
Catholicism, which has arrived ; it is most complete in deal-
ing with the difficulties of which I spoke to you."

It is interesting to find that this was Dr. Littledale's
rather scandalous book called Plain Reasons against Joining
the Church of Rome, to which at that period those dis-
turbed in their minds by Roman tendencies were regularly
treated. It had not yet been realised how grotesque and
worse many of its pages are. Later, Hugh's life at Mirfield
was harassed by the duty of constantly refuting its argu-
ments in order to relieve those of his Anglican penitents
who found that it struck, not only at the special position of
Rome, but at all they themselves were determined to con-
tinue believing and practising, as well as at Dr. Littledale's
own creed and method. At present Hugh has indeed a
Roman Catholic for friend, but considers his position
necessarily absurd. He has another friend, whom he
regards (perhaps unfairly) as an atheist, who announces
that if Christ's life be in any way to be believed, Roman
Catholicism is the only conceivable scheme into which it

can be fitted. This annoyed, without influencing Hugh.
\ G

98 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

I think it was to this friend that he stoutly maintained that
there was no real difference between the intellectual posi-
tion of an atheist and that of an agnostic. On being
reminded of this in later years, he will deny that he could
ever possibly have supported such a theory.

" I feel great horror," he begins in another letter, " at
not having written more " ; and continues : " Have you
read The New Gospel of Peter ? Don't you think it a rather
feeble idea, that of the necessity of the angels to bring our
Lord from the tomb ? It throws the energy in the wrong
place.

" The authorities do not seem to agree as to its
tendency, docetic or otherwise. Dr. Sinker says it is
entirely orthodox ; while Montie James says that it is most
certainly docetic.

" What is one to say in the Tripos ? "

Observe, then, the purely ascetical interest he feels in
what he reads. As for the critical aspect, he leaves it, with
much sang-froid, to the authorities. All he asks is the
proper thing to say in the examination.

Did he feel it necessary to alter his plan of life at all,
in view of his probable ordination ? I doubt it. It is true
that he finds that he has hitherto taken no interest in
the Trinity College Mission, and entertains three of its
representatives to lunch. Beyond this I find no explicit
reference to religion in these letters, though one quaint
paragraph reveals that Rome was not yet exercising
over his attention more than the spell which is cast by an
object one dislikes.

" Great indignation," he writes on July 24, 1893, " pre-
vails at Cambridge owing to the privileges accorded to
the Extensionists, to whom the Senate House and the
Union are thrown open. And there is one further thing —
in the map of Cambridge printed specially for them, and
drawn out by an apparently competent committee, the
Roman Church is marked as the 'Catholic Church,'

CAMBRIDGE 99

This has been already drawn attention to in the Cam-
bridge Review — with a rhetorical question as to whether
this is the kind of learning extended to them — which is
good."

If it has been suggested that his attitude towards his
father was one of mainly exterior deference, his treatment
of the suggestion of a travelling tutorship, to follow his
going down from Cambridge, seems to modify this. The
Archbishop did not like the idea, though he would not veto
it. Hugh writes to Mr. A. C. Benson that when he told
the Archbishop he would not accept it :

I think he was pleased. We parted on the very best
of terms. I am sorry it should have raised such an intense,
and apparently unreasonable, opposition in those quarters,
but I think it is all smoothed over. ... As you say, with-
out his approval the thing would have been disgraceful —
but it was his approval I was trying to get. I practically
had his consent from the first, but an unwilling one, and
I felt that it was not sufficient.

He made, in consequence, arrangements with Dean
Vaughan of Llandaff to spend some months with him,
previous to ordination, from September onwards.

Only the Tripos itself was left to distract his last days
at Cambridge. Amusing tales survive of the panic to which
its approach reduced him. Mr. Crabtree remembers him
pacing frantically up and down his room, "in an awful
state because he was only going to get a Third." '* My father,
all my uncles, all my brothers — all — all — all got Firsts, and
here am I going to get a Third " ; while Mr. Norman
remembers a yet earlier stage of despair, when Hugh,
furious that he was to be '*the only Eton Colleger who
ever got ploughed," tried by the help of a diet of green tea
(drunk, and at least once smoked), " to acquire the learning
of the ages in a few months."

loo ROBERT HUGH BENSON

As a matter of fact, it was a Third which befell him,
and he forthwith wrote to the Archbishop :

I cannot say that I am exactly disappointed about
the Tripos. It is annoying in one way, but in another it
is satisfactory ; there is a certain grim satisfaction in the
fact that nineteen people failed to get through, while
twenty-seven passed.

The line Hugh Benson was following was that, he
afterwards came to feel, of least resistance. He certainly
did not calculate on the help his father's position would
be to him in a clerical career ; it was natural, however,
that he, at any rate, should follow his father's "profes-
sion," and he was not a little drawn by the consciousness
that he would win his father's highly-prized approval to
a degree most pleasant to his soul, still somewhat filially
afraid. Of marriage he loathed the thought, from con-
genital instinct, unless I err, and perhaps more signifi-
cantly so than if this abhorrence had been merely the
result of ascetical speculation. He foresaw as the one
religious life possible, that of a quiet country clergyman,
with a beautiful garden, an exquisite choir, and a sober,
bachelor existence.^ Or so he came to think. At the time,
he heard echoes of a more positive calling, and confided
to his mother, one Sunday night in the silent park of
Addington, on their way home from Evensong, that he
had answered, "Here am I, send me." A ring, graven
with these words, and for many years worn by Hugh,
will perpetuate this impressive experience.^ Even in 1891,

^ He visited Sundridge Rectory, and decided that that delightful place might
suit him. " But what I should really like," he exclaimed, " is to be a Cardinal."

* A year or two later, when he receives it, he will write : " I liked the motto
extremely— and also very much like the system of writing it inside the ring.
It is nearer than on the outside." Oddly, he speaks as if the motto seemed to
him, by now, wholly his mother's choice.

CAMBRIDGE loi

his father had been praying that Hugh might " hear the
Calling Voice."

Therefore Hugh Benson left Cambridge, having
aroused there his intellect, and struck out into a carefully
restricted area of experience, but with his heart as yet but
half-awakened. Impulsive courage, restless curiosity, but
also ready obedience to the commands which a discreet
convention, spiritual and temporal, recognised, were his ;
but not yet any biting self-denial, any really root-tempta-
tion wrestled with and overcome, nor much shutting of
the outer eyes for the sake of interior vigilance and true
spiritual awareness : an apparent ease in the neglect of
the baser calls of sense, but no profound detachment
from the feeling of self-sufficiency engendered by culture,
conscious or unconscious. At best he was putting no
obstacle to the call to other worlds of ideal and effort ;
he was moving towards an existence as yet unguessed,
super-natural, fourth dimensional, food for a sixth sense,
but always by the path of ordered pieties and decorum
undefied ; the freaks of life were by him circumscribed,
and confined to the domains where trivialities may be
safely given play. His life had, at Cambridge, been
enriched, but not sated : Ecqiiando amabis ? The good
he had gained had but made him more capable of recog-
nising and responding to the summons of a better.

CHAPTER V

ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION
September 1893-OcTOBER 1896

Next to a sound rule of faith, there is nothing of so much consequence as a
sober standard of feeling in matters of practical religion ; and it is the peculiar
happiness of the Church of England to possess, in her authorised formularies,
an ample and secure provision for both. . . •

What if our English air be stirred
With sighs from saintly bosoms heard,
Or penitents, to leaning angels dear,
" Our own, our only Mother is not here ? "

J. Keble : from the Preface to The Christian Yeary
and Mother out of Sight,

From Cambridge, then, Hugh went, in September 1893,
to read for orders under Dean Vaughan at Llandaff. Of
no period in his life have I found it so difficult to form
a satisfactory picture. Perhaps that is not astonishing.
The life itself was rather featureless, its dominant note
being the personality of the Dean himself. And this, for
one who never knew him personally, may defy capture,
even, and still less may be conveyed in written paragraphs.
But it is quite certain that when Mr. Archibald Marshall, in
an article on his close friend Hugh Benson, in the Cornhill
Magazine for February 1915, speaks of his beautiful spirit
with which, rather than with any stamp of ecclesiastical
mark, Vaughan impressed his men, he is not yielding to
sentimental enthusiasm. The great portrait of the Dean, in
the Vaughan Library at Harrow (he had been Headmaster
there), does not wholly fail to convey that mingled im-
pression of sweetness and calm. Benson speaks of his

ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION 103

" extraordinary charm of personality," and of his " high
spirituality," of his remarkable preaching — his sermons
were written out laboriously in an English which was
"simply perfect, comparable only, I think, to that of
Ruskin and Newman." There is a hint that his pliable
and pointed voice, and his special sort of magnetism,
reached but his more " educated hearers " ; but them it
affected "like a strain of music." To his serene faith
and intense love of the Person of Our Lord the most
dogmatically-minded of his hearers succumbed, and then
ceased to quarrel with his liberal evangelicism.^

As a foil, almost, to the gracious piety and austere
learning of Dean Vaughan, was to be found his wife, a
member of the Stanley clan, theologically so alert, ex-
ploring, and independent ; she was, in fact, a sister of the
famous Dean. Like Queen Victoria in feature, she was,
too, witty, versatile to a high degree, and refreshingly
unconventional. Hugh's dim-tinted, harmless life, as he
lived it at Llandaff, was flecked with high lights by
her brilliant presence. Whimsical anecdotes are to be
found concerning this lady, which it would have been a
pleasure to transport from their proper setting into the
memoir of Hugh Benson.

The " post-graduate theological college " which the Dean
maintained was on the whole informal, and its life was free.
The men lived in rooms near the Deanery, and the Dean
directed their reading rather than controlled details of
education.

"I find," Hugh wrote immediately upon arrival, " that
there is a great deal to do here — I have got two sermons to

^ Dean Vaughan reciprocated Hugh's attachment. " Give the Archbishop,"
he once wrote, " my dutiful love, and thank him for all his kindness, and especi-
ally for the loan to me of his son — whom I love P "This I record," the Arch-
bishop adds in his diary, " for dear Hugh's sake."

I04 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

preach this term — and a service to take, and several Lessons
to read ; I have just had a district given me, which I am
going to begin on to-morrow. I am told by some people
here that the visiting is not really much good, because the
people never will listen to a layman, and they always
expect money, and are rather spoilt. I shall try this term
though, and see how I get on."

He is still troubled with this topic of sick-visiting in the
November of 1894.

Nov. 16, 1894.

I have been reading a very good book on Catechising
by Bishop Dupanloup. Have you read it ? I believe he is
the Roman Bishop of Orleans.

He has also, he proceeds, been reading Hooker, Book V,
but can find no satisfactory work on Pastoral Theology.
Gibson's Lectures and a book by Dr. Moule deal chiefly
with " the way the clergyman should himself live at home."
The Priest's Inner Life, by Liddon, does not deal with
visiting.

These things, after all, are not to be learnt out of books,
and if instinct, or a predominant sense of duty, does not
make the pastoral function an integral part of a priest's
existence, it may be doubted whether he will ever succeed
in that particular department. To the end you will find that
Hugh proclaims, and truly, that he has no pastoral soul.

" Poor people," he sums up, after a long description of
a visit to a sick boy (whose pain and patience had much
impressed him), ''poor people are so dreadfully funny
about everything."

However, he was to have a suitable amount of practice
in this part, too, of possible ministerial duty.

''Sept. 28, 1892 [i.e. 1893].

" I have just been appointed to the ' Bishopric ' of Pont-
canna. It is always in the charge of one of us, who is

ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION 105

called the 'Bishop,' and it means preaching every other
Sunday and reading the service on the other Sundays.

" I have just had a letter from Sinclair Donaldson," he
adds, "asking me if I should like to come to the Eton
Mission when I am ordained.

'< I think I should like it more than anything else. It is
an ideal thing, I think, to work in the Mission of one's old
school, particularly with such a man as Sinclair Donaldson.

" What do you think about it ? I have written to him
to thank him and to say that I have written to you."

From the bundle of letters, still surviving among the late
Archbishop's papers, I can remember constant allusions to
football matches (he played half-back for some club against
Cardiff) ; to a boys' class at Pontcanna, where the boys
proved restive after a time and had to be evicted ; and to a
few "cases" among the poorer folk which claimed pecu-
niary aid or institutional intervention. Dr. Barnardo's
name, and the like, flicker briefly across the pages. He is
faithful, too, in sending some proportion of the weekly
sermons he wrote for the Dean home to his father or his
sister Maggie, to have them corrected, and in giving his
father a fairly complete list (I suppose) of the books he was
reading with the Dean. When he found them tedious he
said so frankly ; sometimes he was carried away, and even
in these letters, dutiful, and at times almost deprecatory,
and often downright school-boyish in their phrasing, some-
thing of Hugh's impetuous generalisations flashes forth.

" I have been reading," he tells the Archbishop,
" Hammond's book, English Nonconformity and Christ's
Christianity ; it is a splendid book, and, it seems to me,
entirely conclusive. My only wonder is that there are any
reasonable Nonconformists any more in existence."

This firm adherence to Church of England orthodoxy
gains, at this time, a slightly more ecclesiastical tinge, due
to a particular acquaintance, he tells us, and to a revival of

io6 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

the influence of John Inglesant. He begins to " prefer "
Communion before breakfast. He enters upon the dream,
never wholly to leave him, of setting up some community
or other like that of Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding. He
visits a few houses, even, which he fancies suitable for
this ; but the idea remained a floating one.

In the summer of 1894 he asked and obtained his father's
permission to go to Switzerland, fixing on the Riffel Alp,
which he already knew as an ideal destination. His father,
however, planned out a different tour which in itself sounds
delightful ; but " what I had been very anxious to do was
to go to the Riffel and do glacier-walking and Riffel Horn
climbing, and one big peak." It cannot, Hugh urges, injure
his health — he has had lately a great deal of exercise in
the way of " hare and hounds," such as six miles in three-
quarters of an hour ; and his doctor considers that he has
grown much stronger than he expected, and has by no
means "remained abnormally undeveloped." He enters
into considerable detail with regard to economy, though
indeed, at this period, he has to own that his allowance
never quite covers his expenses.

" I heard from Mama," he concludes, " this morning,
that I might go anywhere in Switzerland. I think I should
prefer the Riffel to any other place. If the Riffelberg is
any cheaper, I am thinking of going there — it is higher, for
one thing.

" I am so very grateful to you for allowing me to go to
Switzerland — and more especially for allowing me to choose
my place. I shall enjoy it enormously."

The time passed rapidly, on the whole, and he found
himself on the eve of the Universities Preliminary examina-
tion. I find myself entirely unable to become clear as to
its theological nature. Doubtless his very unsystematic
course of reading included some " set books " at anyrate,

ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION 107

and I expect a certain outline of Church history, and per-
haps some elementary patristic work and a good deal of
semi-devotional literature. Anyhow, in this examination
he got a First, and wrote to his father :

Thank you very much for your congratulatory tele-
gram. I am delightfully surprised. I had terrible dreams
last night about it — six altogether — in two of them I got
Firsts, in three a Third, and in one I failed. It is a long
time, the Dean said this morning, since any of us have
gone in for that examination and got a First.

Dean Vaughan wished the candidates for ordination to
spend the few days immediately preceding that ceremony
at Llandaff. Hugh, however, had different plans.

I have been thinking about what I said to you about
retiring before my ordination. I think that Llandaff is a
splendid place for the preceding year — but somehow not
suitable for the six or seven weeks [or, days 7\just before.
I should like, if possible, to be absolutely alone — I mean
without any servants — and to be in a place where I should
not meet people at all — I could do all necessary things in
the way of meals and sleeping for myself. I do feel that
I want to be entirely alone. You propose St. David's. I
should think that that would be delightful in every way —
if there was any place a few miles out where I could be
entirely alone. I could go in on Sunday to St, David's,
and receive the Holy Communion there, but otherwise see
no one at all. Could you write and tell me what you think
about this question, and also to the Dean ? I feel I would
sooner you wrote to the Dean than that I should speak to
him of it.

November ^rd.

I am taking your advice about making methodical
plans for that time. I dread the going away next week,
chiefly because it has been so delightful here, and partly
because I hate going away from any place. The good-byes
are always so unpleasant.

It was decided, after a good deal of discussion, that
he should go to Lincoln for his retreat. He did so, taking

io8 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

rooms in a park lodge a few miles outside the city. In his
letters home he mentions how he walked to certain places
recollected from among childhood's dim or oddly vivid
memories ; he recognises this or that triviality ; this or that
massive fact he wholly has forgotten. He examines the
Chancery ; notes his father's coat-of-arms in the window ;
haunts the Cathedral, which he finds of unique and trans-
cendent beauty; "Cologne," he decides, "does not come
anywhere near it," an independent judgment which per-
haps does him credit. What he seems not to mention is
the period of "desolation," as they say, through which
he passed there, and on which he insists so much in the
Confessions.

He had arranged to spend the day in prayer, medita-
tion, and exercise. It is significant that he already often
recites the " Little Hours " at anyrate, though, of course,
in English. For reasons diversely to be diagnosed, he
enters a " mental agony." There is no truth in religion :
Jesus Christ is not God ; the whole of life is an empty
sham ; he himself is, if not the chiefest of sinners, at least
the most monumental of fools. On Advent Sunday he
walks, fasting, into Lincoln, communicates, sits about in
the dusky nave of the Cathedral. The sonorous offices of
Advent proceed : there is always a touch of tragedy and
terror in their austerity. The Second Coming is announced
in prayer and hymn, and be it true or untrue, the future
seems either way cloudy and appalling.

Was this due just to that tense excitement to which
Hugh refers, at the prospect of his diaconate, making its
reaction felt, as it were, before the time ? Was it a kind of
struggle of the purely human creature, feeling itself about
to be enchained ? To all very mobile souls finality brings
in varying degree a sense of horror. In the case of

ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION 109

some, the mere trappings of the cleric's state, the com-
promising collar, the customary suit of solemn black, the
touch of superciliousness or of cynic humour discernible
in so many of the greetings it becomes a Levite's lot to
receive, are enough to terrify their nervous soul, anxious
lest one freedom should be bought too dearly at the price
of another. For others, the finality of an internal obliga-
tion, even celestial, even that of the sacerdos in cBternuniy
brings with it the pains of death. Or possibly, as some
will surmise, God was bidding His servant pass through
that "dark night of the soul" which, since Gethsemane,
seems to be preface to all great acts of self-surrender. At
this distance of time it were impossible to diagnose the
cause of Hugh's spiritual trouble. The clouds cleared
somewhat. Hugh returned to Addington, and was ordained
deacon in the Parish Church at Croydon. He alludes
to this a trifle cynically in his Confessions, acknowledging
himself " still shaken and . . . spiritually hysterical." Of
this same ordination his father, far more deeply moved,
wrote in his diary :

We have had a happy Ember Week — nineteen men,
who have passed very well, and given every promise of true
ministers. I had the wonderful happiness of laying hands
on my Hugh. He had passed First Class in the Universities
Preliminary Examination, and was first also in the part
which is done here, and especially in the sermon. All
the examiners agree. Accordingly he was gospeller. His
pre-eminent interest in theology, and the singleness and
eagerness of his character give us beautiful hopes of his
humble service to God and the poor. He begins, indeed,
among the lowest at Hackney Wick in the Eton Mission.
God keep him stable and strong in His Son Christ.

Surrounded, then, by the great love of his father and
mother, Hugh spent a brief interspace of days at home,
at Addington, before actually starting on his new work.

no ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Hugh was sincerely happy in his home ; and all that in
later years was known as so characteristic of him, all his
inventiveness, boyish enthusiasm, keenness on a hundred
crossing scents, was already there. Mr. A. Marshall, in
the article already quoted, offers us a rare glimpse of
that holiday life at Addington, with the ferny glades and
hollows of its park, and at Lambeth, with its romantic
towers. The Archbishop liked to have young people
there, and unbent to them in all kindness and courtesy.
"As for Mrs. Benson," Mr. Marshall writes, "it is difficult
to speak of her kindness in even terms." She would " pack
off" Hugh and Hugh's friends in one of the Archiepis-
copal carriages to see a play ; she would love to hear of
their stealing out to witness the " blood-curdling melo-
dramas " of the Surrey side : '' I can see (her) shaking
with laughter at Hugh's descriptions of our experiences.
She was always ready to get a talk with us ; she was as
young as we were, and we were very young then, even for
our years."

From the organ loft, where one or both of them
played, as a rule, at the morning and evening services in the
cha,pel — and it is safe to say that Mr. Marshall was for much
in the maintenance and development of Hugh's musical
tastes — a way led straight to the Lambeth smoking-room
(once, it was said, Cranmer's bedroom). Thither Hugh
rushed, fresh from Bach and Palestrina, to his cigarettes,
or to the pipe (discarded, as years passed) which once
set him alight, as, on his white horse, he rode along
Vauxhall from Lambeth down to Addington. There the
friends would stay, alone sometimes, using a delightful
sunny room called the schoolroom, and having their
" abundant meals " in the steward's room. Over these
meals they read, but also talked, on topics growing deeper

ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION iii

as the months went by, after Hugh's ordination. Also,
they shot, and rode, and, climbing a wooded knoll when
evening came, waited, with books in hand, for the wood-
pigeons to come over.

I shall be forgiven for quoting one whole paragraph
in full :

At the times when the Archbishop was in residence
at Addington, life was no less pleasant for a guest such
as I was. Hugh's brothers were often there, and there
were the two chaplains — young men, as the Archbishop
liked them to be, and not too much taken up by their
duties, in those quieter months, to be unable to enjoy
the ordinary pleasures of a country house. Life went
quietly and serenely, with plenty to do, outdoors and in.
There was always much discussion going on, especially
when the younger men, and others who might be staying
in the house, met at night at " Philippi." This was the
large attic smoking-room, which had to be away from
the rooms occupied by the Archbishop. Sometimes the
discussion waxed rather warm. Hugh and one of the
chaplains once ended by falling out seriously. The next
morning Hugh went away for a few days with the breach
still unhealed. When he returned, the chaplain met him,
and said, " When you had left, I thought things over,
and came to the conclusion that you had been right. So
I bought you a box of the most expensive cigarettes, to
make up." Then a smile began to spread over his face.
" But they were so good that I'm afraid I have smoked
them all," he said.

But by this time the real work of his life was beginning
for Hugh at Hackney.

The Eton Mission was one of those many school
Missions which were inaugurated in the eighties. They
consist, as a rule, of a parish of which the congregation
is of the poorest, while the church and its annexes are
built and maintained by the subscriptions of the school
responsible for the Mission, and staffed, if possible, by

112 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

"old boys" of the parent school. These Missions were
carried forward by the wave of social and philanthropic
enterprise which at that period was sweeping all before
it ; and they were meant to produce a double effect — the
evangelisation, that is, not only of the district in which
they existed, but of the school which created them. It
was felt, of course, that an accumulation of boys belong-
ing, as the members of the big public schools are supposed
on the whole to do, to the wealthier classes might be
taught in this way the responsibilities of fortune, and
also, by the various kinds of contact thus engineered, be
brought into organic and spiritual connection with classes
other than their own. It would be out of place to discuss
how far this plan succeeds ; what is quite clear is that
the several Missions do provide a rallying-point, a centre
naturally turned to, for those Etonians, Harrovians, and
Wykehamists, and so on, who from whatever cause find
themselves touched with social zeal. That it will be the
" old boys," rather than the actual generation of the school,
who in various ways are thus awakened, does not imply
that the enterprise, even as a school enterprise, is a failure.
If the Mission clergy be men, like the late Fr. Dolling,
who know how to put themselves in sympathy with boys'
imagination and points of view, there is no reason why
even at school boys should not take a keen and formative
interest in their Mission. It remains that I cannot re-
member any such interest being generally felt for the
only Mission I have personally known, and Mr. A. C.
Benson seems to imply that neither at Eton was the
Hackney Wick parish an object of much actual enthusiasm.
I need not say that merely to invite subscriptions from
the boys to their Mission or settlement is of all methods
the most futile : personal service is alone of value.

ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION 113

The Rev. St. Clair Donaldson had, it will be remem-
bered, invited Hugh's presence on the Mission staff as
early as 1893. This clergyman, afterwards Archbishop of
Brisbane, is described as Evangelical by Mr. A. C. Ben-
son, and as doing a work at Hackney Wick which was
" moderate, kindly, and sensible," in succession to a very
High Church vicar, the Rev. William Carter, afterwards
Archbishop of Capetown. The enterprise had become,
by 1895, a very considerable affair : church, church-
house, clubs, and the like were impressive and well
subsidised ; there were, I think, two, or perhaps three,
curates besides Hugh. Hugh mentions that the more
" Catholic " of the methods once in vogue in the Mission
had been modified. The confessions heard in the vestry
were now rare ; the daily celebration in Bodley's solemn
Gothic church, with its Latin inscriptions and air of
High Church Anglicanism, had been reduced in number ;
a ladies' settlement sought to do the work Catholics would
usually entrust to nuns ; temperance propaganda throve ;
the Band of Hope was said to be the best in London.

I should be ready to believe that Hugh was happier

there than you could gather from his Confessions, or

even from his letters of this period, though these, I

confess, seem more robust and full of downright jokes

than before or after. Other letters, addressed to him

when he left, show how much he had made himself

beloved. Besides, as I said, he writes to his father with

regard to what the Archbishop wanted to be told rather

than with a spontaneous expression of what filled his

own mind ; and the Confessions, in all this part, are a

guide of doubtful value psychologically speaking. His

mother, utterly in sympathy (as from more than one of

her letters is apparent) with their portrait of his feelings
I H

114 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

after, say, 1902, cannot recognise their full truthfulness
previously to that date.

The first letter he wrote to the Archbishop from the
Mission gives some sort of picture of his life there :

\ January 1895.]

When I arrived on Friday night I went to a large
children's party, with prize-giving, &c,, and last night I
just went into an "Infants' Tea" — and to-day there has
been teaching in the Sunday School, which I found
very hard, much harder than preaching, as one sees the
boredom of one's audience so much more clearly. Then
there was a large children's service. ... I feel so terribly
incompetent at present. All the rest of them know the
children by sight and name, &c. And at present I
scarcely know a single person by sight. Also, they know
how to do things — and I am only falling over my own
experiments — but I suppose these things will improve. I
am looking forward very much to my time here. ... I
have not got to preach for some time yet, I am glad
to say.

And a little later :

January 1895.

I am attached to the Men's Club here particularly,
and have to go in generally in the evening and talk to
them ; they are much more sociable than I expected,
and I think I have made friends with five or six of
them. But there is a class of them who play cards, and
apparently have not the slightest wish to pay one any
attention. In visiting I have made a beginning ; but
it is very hard starting with a large number of people
none of whom I have ever seen before. We all meet —
the ladies as well — and go over the district on paper on
Monday morning. For the first time, to-day, I have been
deputed to visit sick people in my district, and am
going to do it this afternoon, but I am very anxious
about it.

And again :

January 18, 1895.

I find this a terrible place for sleepiness. One does
not get back to the house generally till eleven, and one
cannot instantly go to bed ; and there is Service every

ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION 115

morning at eight at least — sometimes at 7.30. And I am
always very sleepy in the morning, and have several
devices for waking — an alarum, and a string tied to my
finger which is pulled like a bell-rope from outside. This
morning everything failed except the alarum, which woke
me. I find it quite necessary to have more than one
thing to depend on.

Sinclair works most terribly hard, and is perpetually
on the move about the parish ; with addresses, &c. I
cannot think how he does it to that extent ; and he is
always perfectly cheerful, which is most reassuring. He
is quite a splendid person to be under.

I am beginning to have sick visiting, and I think
that on the whole it is easier than ordinary visiting : it
always seems hard to say certain things out of a clear
sky, which is not so in sick visiting. The sick seem to
expect it much more ; it is extraordinary how a sick
person seems to be a kind of free show to all the
neighbours, who crowd into the room and stare solemnly.
The sick person himself, too, seems to appreciate the
dignity of suffering, though they often turn it into the
conceit of suffering instead.

He lost no time, however, in creating some such en-
vironment as he felt himself to need.

Most of my pictures are hung now, and bookcases are
beginning to come in. I have an immense lot of books —
many of them novels (in which I am my mamma's son).
Several also dealing with drawing-room mysticism (in
which also I am my mamma's son).

In the sketch-book I have mentioned above there are
numerous little portraits of Hugh's fellow-curates, by Hugh,
and of Hugh by them. Hugh sits, as a rule, in an attitude
of contented collapse, in a vast arm-chair. There are two
or three indescribably depressing drawings of the Hackney
Marshes; and one page is full of tiny sketches of all
manner of Mission athletic sports, and other Mission in-
cidents. A billiard table is labelled " every evening " ; a
youth playing baseball (one would gather) is ticketed

ii6 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

" every day." There are cricket and football matches, and
races ; a card-table, and an enormous soup-kitchen with
Gothic windows. A Hackney dame exclaims, in a phrase
Hugh was singularly devoted to, "We can't help being
poor, but we can help being honest " ; and the central
figure of the page is a really well-characterised coster,
shouting, at the "Eton Mission and Mansfield House"
match, in 1895, "Bust 'is 'ead. Butty !" Sometimes a brief
legend disarms our criticism : " This is intended to re-
present the dog ' Timothy ' — with the fireplace behind, but
it is not really very like him or the fireplace." And in the
midst of these full-blooded caricatures, appears the exotic
black and white silhouette of " A Lady, after Aubrey Beard-
sley." This is a tiny hint ; but it is reinforced by a sen-
tence from a very entertaining correspondent, who regrets
that two letters of Hugh's have never reached him. " It
is a blow to me," he writes, " to hear what I lost — all
the virtue of The Green Carnation without the vice, no
doubt." He also tells Hugh a story about Mr. Richard Le
Gallienne, adding, " Please don't tell the story as coming
from me, for I don't believe a word of it. Tell it as X's,
or better still, Y's." He recommends a story by Mr.
Montague James in the National Review. " It is a gem —
thoroughly Jamesian with slight touches of Lefanu, and
quite as blood-curdling." Observe, then, the authors, whom
Benson, in his conventional environment, did not deny to
himself. Else, he became accustomed to regard the Eton
Mission as an extreme instance of the Suitable, a category
for which he has, you will notice, a cordial detestation.
In None Other Gods, the Mission is depicted in a mixed
spirit of affection, respect, and amused annoyance. The
curate visits his district, and that makes a bitter little
vignette : Frank Guiseley calls on the curate, and finds his

ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION 117

room a portent of suitability : its chairs, its photos, its
trophies, its cocoa, its occupant are all so exactly what
they should be. . . . And if you seek for his extremest con-
demnation of the suitable, you will find it, I think, incar-
nated in the marriage of Annie Hamilton and Lord Brasted
in The Sentimentalists, and of Lady Sarah and Jim in A
Winnowing. But there is hardly a modern book of his in
which he does not gibe at the *' Suitable." All that, he
wanted to see burnt up by the " fire of love," which was
precisely what the diagnosis of Mr. A. C. Benson sees to
be lacking in the Mission's ordered philanthropy.

Hugh, therefore, was confessedly not in his place in the
Hackney Wick Church house, and felt this.

" He never found (his duties there)," his brother
writes in Hugh, "a congenial occupation, and I cannot
help feeling that it was rather a case of putting a very
delicate and subtle instrument to do a rough sort of work.
What was needed was a hearty, kindly, elder-brotherly
relation, and the men who did this best were the good-
natured and robust men with a generic interest in the
young, who could set a clean-minded, wholesome, and
hearty example. But Hugh was not of this type. His
mind was full of mystical and poetical ideas of religion,
and his artistic nature was intent upon expressing them.
He was successful in a way, because he had by this time
a great charm of frankness and simplicity ; he never had
the least temptation to draw social distinctions, but he
desired to find people personally interesting. He used to
say afterwards that he did not really believe in what involved
a sort of social condescension, and, like another incisive
missioner, he thought that the giving up a few evenings a
week by wealthy and even fashionable young men, how-
ever good-hearted and earnest, to sharing the amusements
of the boys of a parish, was only a very uncomfortable
way of showing the poor how the rich lived ! "

It may be said that in his work with children he found
what was best suited to his temperament.

ii8 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

"In 1895," a friend of his wrote afterwards, "when he
was at the Eton Mission, I once heard him take a Children's
Service, and afterwards train a whole lot of children for
a Christmas pantomime, which he had himself written, on
the Rose and the Ring. I do not know which performance
was the more impressive. He established strong cords
of sympathy and affection with children, and I think they
loved him because he loved them."

He continued his custom of using fairy-stories as an
" approach," which he had begun at Pontcanna.

" I lent him," he writes to Mrs. Benson, " the Green Fairy
Booky with Mary Benson, Addington, written in the be-
ginning. That book has done a surprising amount of
work, and I expect will do a good deal more before you
see it again : if such an unlikely thing ever happens."

He takes children down to Addington, and his letters are
full of the Rose and the Ring when he is preparing that
pantomime ; he sketches its rehearsal, too, in his little
book, and it would seem to have been a very considerable
affair. To bear out his friend's juxtaposition of ritual and
rehearsal, there exists, too, a book of Children's Services,
and instructions most accurately planned. Yet he did not
confine his instructions, nor his successes, to children.

"I am beginning," he tells his father, "two classes a
week for some of our choir men on the Prayer Book
and Bible-^the Bible Classes are for the Sunday School
Examination. It is delightful to try to teach people who
want to learn — for a change : "

and he certainly finds that it is by these more conversational
approaches that he comes nearer souls than in the pulpit.
In view of his later experiences, it is odd to find that he
could not preach extempore.

Once he did indeed attempt to do so, with much
nervousness and hesitation.

ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION 119

The same evening St. Clair Donaldson said to him
kindly but firmly that preachers were of two kinds — the
kind that could write a fairly coherent discourse and
deliver it more or less impressively, and the kind that
might venture, after careful preparation, to speak extempore ;
and that he felt bound to tell Hugh that he belonged
undoubtedly to the first kind.^

Lord Stanmore, however, Mr. A. C. Benson goes on to
say, no inexperienced judge, placed Hugh even before his
conversion in the first rank of Anglican preachers.

On one famous occasion, extempore harangue was
forced upon Hugh. He had been appointed to read the
funeral service, and, at the set hour, no hearse arrived.
Hugh read collects and suitable passages of Scripture and
delivered an address. Finally he gave out the number of
a hymn ; it was unknown ; the organist had deserted his
post. Hugh sang the hymn as a solo.

This was, I think, the funeral of which he writes :

I am taking my first funeral to-day — a child whom I
visited when he was ill. I had to go and see him lying in
state, which was horrible. The parents had a sense of
pleased proprietorship which was not so apparent when
he was alive ; and there were doors to be unlocked, and
horrible yellow blinds to cast a lurid light.

Quite early in his stay at the Eton Mission — in fact,
in February, 1895 — he was invited to attend a retreat at
Kemsing, a village near Sevenoaks, afterwards important in
his life. The retreat marked an epoch. Of it he wrote to
his father the following brief words :

My dear Papa, — I am writing to wish you many
happy returns of the day for to-morrow ; I am afraid I
have not often remembered your birthday before.

We have had a delightful time here this last week ; the
addresses were splendid. There were about twelve clergy
here, together with three or four laymen.

1 Hugh, p. 86.

I20 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

One of these laymen was Mr. A. Marshall, who went,
like Hugh, nervous lest the flesh should be too weak to
bear the strain of a retreat lasting two full days, and
involving seven addresses in all, of an hour each, a day
strictly mapped out, and offices recited in common. " But
there was no strain," says Mr. Marshall. " Fr. Maturin,
then of the Cowley Fathers, of all the preachers I have
ever heard, was, at his best, the most capable of holding
his hearers' attention ; and he was at his very best then.
He sat in a chair on the chancel step, underneath the
carved arcading of the rood loft, and talked ; and I, for
one, hardly took my eyes off him."

" I was," says Benson,^ " completely taken by storm.
For the first time Christian Doctrine, as Father Maturin
preached it, displayed itself to me as an orderly scheme.
I saw now how things fitted on one to the other, how the
sacraments followed inevitably from the Incarnation, how
body and spirit were alike met in the mercy of God. . . .
He caught up my fragments of thought, my glimpses of
spiritual experience, my gropings in the twilight, and
showed me the whole, glowing and transfigured in an
immense scheme whose existence I had not suspected.
He touched my heart also, profoundly, as well as my head,
revealing to me the springs and motives of my own nature
in a completely new manner."

Hugh, however, on those wintry afternoons, argued
" in his hot, dogmatic way, which yet was logical and
persuasive," says Mr. Marshall, against the practice of
Confession, on which Fr. Maturin so strongly dwelt.
There was no hint that Hugh would budge from his via
media of doctrine, which was so accurate that he considered
its suitable expression, in clerical dress, to be a frock-coat,
a white tie, and any collar that was not Roman. . . . Hugh
at this time believed that, in days gone by, the Church of

^ Confessions, p. 35.

ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION 121

England had admittedly stood for a certain scheme of
religion, neither Roman nor Protestant, and that this had
been authoritatively recognised.

" I believe," says Mr. Marshall, shrewdly at anyrate,
*' that if he had lived at the beginning of the nineteenth
century instead of at the end, he would never have left the
Church of England. He was an extreme controversialist
at all times, but it was necessary for him to feel that he
had widely-admitted authority behind him. That has been
impossible in the Church of England since the Oxford
Movement turned its level plain into a mountain, upon one
slope or other of which its clergy must find a foothold,
each for himself. There is no authority that is universally
accepted in the Church of England, and with Hugh's
temperament, when he had once set foot upon the slope
that is on the Romeward side, he was bound to end where
he did, little as he or his friends thought it. I remember
his saying to me, a few years after he had ' gone over ' :
' It is such a relief to find my bishop as High Church as I
am.' He had reached the level ground then, and could
use all his artillery against those still on the slopes, without
fear of being attacked from a position higher up or lower
down."

I think it was at this time, or very slightly later, that
he made a full and elaborate transcript of St. Ignatius's
Exercisesy with amplifications. The results of this are seen
in By What Authority ? written, of course, before he was a
Catholic. Later on, his spirituality migrated somewhat
from the Ignatian to what he considered a more Carthusian
or Benedictine method.

Hugh returned, after the retreat, to Hackney Wick,
and in due course was ordained. He relates that he pre-
faced his new life by a general confession, made, with the
Archbishop's full knowledge and consent, to a kind and
skilful clergyman, who set Hugh a penance which would
last half an hour daily till his next confession, three months

122 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

distant. The joy which followed this confession was, he
says, " simply indescribable. I went home in a kind of
ecstasy." So, too, was his ordination an '' immense happi-
ness." He walked about the Addington woods, exulting
in the conviction that he was now a priest, and could do
for others what they hitherto had done for him. Here,
indeed, is the sacerdotal spirit : Hugh Benson feels that
he has not only a higher position, but is in some sense
altered even as man, by his ordination. A new and unique
spirit, and hence a new, unshared power of action, is
within him.

He returns, therefore, to the Eton Mission full of a new
enthusiasm, more than content, obstinately sure, for in-
stance, that the intellectual position of his Cambridge
friend (now Fr. Ritchie of the Birmingham Oratory) must
necessarily, being Romanist, be ridiculous.^ Still, he goes
to stay with him in Cornwall, and, having no cassock of
his own, borrows his friend's religious habit, and, in a sort
of joyous excitement, wears it in the pulpit of the parish
church.^

For all that, his personal religion was still deepening,
and, together with a dawning notion of the corporate life
of the Christian as symbolised in and produced through
the Sacraments, he begins to realise that these very

^ Riding one day with the Archbishop down Bird-Cage Walk towards Lambeth,
he will declare he has never understood that article of the creed which professes
belief in the Holy Catholic Church. For instance, he inquires, are the Roman
Catholics " a part of the Church of Christ " ? The Archbishop could not answer
categorically : perhaps their errors had been such as to involve their forfeiting
membership in Christ's Body ... I give this anecdote, abbreviating a little,
from the Confessions. It is right to say that to Hugh's family this appears
wholly uncharacteristic of the Archbishop, "who always answered such questions
fully and eagerly."

* Why, then, so excitedly ? Simply with the schoolboy's joy in dressing up,
which led him to appropriate and wear a friend's M.A. hood at a religious
function in Sunningdale ? How long will it be before this element of excitement
will be filtered from his life ?

ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION 123

sacraments are perhaps necessary for that materialising of
religion exacted too by the soul as individual. The clubs
and visiting and pantomimes and all the programme of
philanthropy, so scientifically and self-regardlessly carried
out at the Eton Mission, seem to him almost non-religious.
He begins to long for a chaplain's life, and in January,
1896, asks to discuss, with his father, plans for a near
departure.

But the decision was taken from his hands. In October
1896, the Archbishop died suddenly, in Mr. Gladstone's
church at Hawarden. Hugh was given the telegram
when actually taking Sunday School. He travelled down
to Hawarden that night, and, in the train, read the Even-
song appointed for that day. In the Second Lesson, he
will always thereafter recollect, occurred these words :
" Lord, suffer me first to bury my father, and then I will
follow Thee." The days of burial were indeed full of a
certain distraction of "dignity and sorrow." Hugh cele-
brated at Hawarden before he left for Canterbury, where
the actual funeral took place in a violent storm of thunder,
rain, and wind. Hugh returned to Addington, still half
dazed with the shock of so many violent impressions.
" There was a sensation," as long afterwards he remembered
some one saying to him, " as if the roof were gone. How-
ever grown-up one is, one's father always stands as a
sort of protective covering to one's own weakness." He
had meant, as from a letter from his vicar is quite clear, to
return on the subsequent Saturday to Hackney. " I can
quite imagine you will wish to do so. For, after all, work
is a welcome refuge." But at a week's notice he was
ordered to Egypt with his mother and sister, being
threatened with rheumatic fever, and he never returned
to the Mission. He sailed in the Sutlej from Venice on

124 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Nov. 25 ; and I see that on Nov. 20 his going to a curacy
at Kemsing had already been arranged.^

A few pathetic letters of farewell survive among his
papers. Let me quote one which any man might feel
happy to receive.

A parishioner wrote to him :

Can you not go away for the winter and come back
to us in the spring do not leave us altogether we are all
rough and Ignorant but our love is strong if not shown in
the best way, and I feel that I am in some way answerable
for your Trouble I wish I had not spoken to you as I
did it worries me more than I can say and yet I only
answered you according to what you was saying. ... I
am selfish but I know I was one of the first you visited
when you first came and you did not mind my rough way
of speaking to you and there are a great many who think
just as much as we do . . . do not give us up altogether it
seems so strange that as soon as we get a clergyman we
like they leave us we must be a dreadful lot of people.

He closed thus a momentous chapter in his life. It
had included that ordination which will govern so much
of his future, for he will never be able to think of himself
otherwise than as a priest, and therefore with the duty of
acting directly upon souls. His personal charm and power
will reinforce his belief, and he will succeed in this line
of direct spiritual action, and he will feel no need for
further professional study, nor fear lest by leaving to one
side the ordinary cares of parochial energy, he is abandon-

^ There is an anecdote which shows, I think, the sort of gentle flippancy
often noticeable in Hugh, which, when mingled with genuine gravity of under-
lying feeling, issues, I think, almost into tenderness.

"I had been taught," a friend of Hugh's has written to me, " to love and
admire the Archbishop, through reading A. C. Benson's biography. After visit-
ing the tomb at Canterbury, I said to Mgr. Benson : ' I felt more inclined to ask
his prayers than to pray for him.' ' Yes,' he answered, ' I understand that.' ' I
don't believe,' I said, ' a man like that has any Purgatory.' He answered with a
twinkle : ' Oh, I think if it was left to me, I'd give him about fiye minutes.' "

Hugh Benson regularly said Mass for his father's soul.

ORDINATION: THE ETON MISSION 125

ing his duty. He has found his road, and all his reading
and observation will be arranged, henceforward, to corro-
borate his march therein.

One regret he will always keep. He had not really
known the father whose devotion for him was so passion-
ate and profound. Even when he realised him the better
from his own increasing experience, his love had remained
all too inarticulate. Years later, on reading the Arch-
bishop's life by Mr. A. C. Benson, he will recognise this
yet more fully, and to his mother he will write from
Cambridge :

July <)th, 1905.

By the way, I have been reading through papa's Life —
what a book ! It is one of the most interesting and affect-
ing things I have ever read. And how extraordinarily well
Arthur has done it ! I wish I could have read it twenty
years ago.

Meanwhile, his horizon was to widen rapidly, and his
whole spiritual life to grow yet more marked and moulded
in its destined lines.

CHAPTER VI
AT KEMSING

Con Fanciulli Fanciullo sapientemente.

From an Epigram on St. Philip Neri at Rome.

Mrs. Craigie, when relating the very singular conversion
of Lord Marlesford, tells how he started for Norway, but
broke the journey at Paris, which he found

insufferably tedious, and a story too old for words. He
abandoned the Norway expedition, and went instead to
Venice. In Venice it seemed almost vulgar to be a Pro-
testant ; he hurried on to Florence. To be a Protestant
in Florence is to be a tourist at best ! He went to Rome.
To be a Protestant in Rome was to be uncivilised, illiterate,
and a shade ridiculous. Two months later he was received
into the Roman Church.

The few months which Hugh Benson now spent in the
East had, in sober fact, really something of a similar
influence upon him. His contentment with the Church
of England suffered a shock. He travelled straight through
France and across North Italy to Venice, and in church
after church he found himself, as an ecclesiastical official,
to be ignored. " Behold ! we were nowhere." From
Venice he sailed to Egypt, and at Luxor assisted the
hotel chaplain in his services, feeling the whole business
to be "terribly isolated and provincial." You recognise
how out of place are the Englishwomen you will meet
in continental trains, drinking their tea cooked over spirit-
lamps, with milk boiled for fear of infection ; you resent

their clothes, revealed, in France, as perfectly impossible ;

126

AT KEMSING 127

you feel brutal towards their stiffnesses, and derisive of
their timid unconventionalities, their condescensions to
the fact that here they are "abroad." So, I think with-
out flippancy, one may say Hugh felt towards the decorous
prayer-book offices recited by clergymen in Egyptian
hotels. In one place he explicitly sees the English religion
carried about by its owner, as some comfortable and
customary appendage, an india-rubber bath. . . .

Mr. J. H. Molesworth, then a clergyman of the Church
of England, met him first at Luxor, where, " with charac-
teristic energy and enthusiasm, Hugh was excavating in
the Temple of Muth." They then inaugurated a friend-
ship which lasted unbroken till his death. There, too,
Hugh entered a little village church, hut-like among other
Arab huts, and, for all the spangles, muslin, and crimped
paper of its decoration, he felt that it was there in its
proper place, and had become racy of the soil. In its
strange atmosphere. Catholic faith for the first time, he
surmises, stirred within him. The enormous question
for the first time addressed itself to him : Could Rome be
right ? The respect involved in fear began to substitute
itself for the contempt he had so far felt for the papal
system.! For his " reassurance " he fled to the Copts, and
sent a pair of candlesticks, on his return to England, to
the Coptic priest, for his altar. . . . Were the Copts in
schism ? Benson did not stop to ask. He felt himself,
perhaps, in something of a glass house. At Cairo he had
already had two audiences of the Coptic Patriarch. He

^ How various are the lenses through which souls view their world ! The
Archbishop, on his tour in Algeria, wrote to the Bishop of Rochester : " I am
much impressed with the [Mohammedan] religion. . . . The Romanists, with
their tawdry idols of St. Joseph, the Immaculate Conception, &c., will never win
these Monotheists. The churches are less spiritual in conception now than the
mosques. . . ." The Archbishop too was a sensitive impressionist. Only, the
impressions fell upon temperaments how different !

128 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

now wrote, begging to be admitted into communion with
him. The Patriarch would not answer, and Hugh was
" left shivering."

In Jerusalem, which Benson reached somewhat later,
and apparently alone, he re-encountered Mr. Molesworth.
Here, as the latter has kindly written,

We arranged to travel together through the Holy Land,
sharing the same tent. In this way I saw a great deal of
him, and it established an intimacy between us. I shall
always reckon it a singular piece of good fortune that I
had as a companion on that camping-out expedition from
Jerusalem to Damascus one who could approach the Holy
Places with so sympathetic and imaginative a mind. His
eager enthusiasm and buoyant spirits, I remember, com-
municated themselves to the entire party of fellow-
travellers.

The recollection of our tour in Palestine stands out fresh
in my mind to-day, although eighteen years have elapsed
since then. We were generally in the saddle most of the
day, starting at six in the morning, and he used thoroughly
to enjoy the ride in the keen morning air. Nothing escaped
his notice as we visited one after another the sacred places.
At nights in our tent we used to have long talks on a
variety of subjects, and he was fond of telling me of
ghost stories and apparitions associated with haunted
houses, &c., in which the Archbishop had been interested.
I thought afterwards I saw in all this a germ of the ideas
that appeared in his earlier books, though at that time he
seemed to be wholly unconscious of the literary powers he
subsequently displayed.

His conversation turned readily on the topic which was
beginning to haunt him, and the road between Jerusalem
and Damascus once more was witness of a spiritual up-
heaval, though it was the beginning, this time, not the
consummating of a process which should change a man
into loving what once he hated ; but a goad at least was
offered now to Hugh against which, for a while, his restive
feet might kick. At Jerusalem itself he found the Anglican

AT KEMSING 129

Bishop kind, and was asked to preach in his chapel, and
was given a cross now hanging on an image of Our
Lady. . . . He obtained, too, leave to celebrate in the
Chapel of Abraham, and the Confraternity of the Blessed
Sacrament provided him with vestments ; but the Greeks
wheeled in a table to replace their altar, which they denied
to him, and watched him with polite curiosity from the
door. Sect after sect, too, officiated at the Sepulchre :
"strange uncouth rites" went forward at Bethlehem.
Alone the Anglican Church was held aloof. For all that,
he surrounded the Oriental Churches with the pathetic
halo given by men to what they woo and cannot win,
while on Rome he bore with a hardness which Mr.
Molesworth considered to be unmerited. Certainly he
was angered to feel himself in " full communion " with
some Irish Protestant fellow-travellers, and wore his
cassock publicly, by way of protest, and joined with an
American clergyman, now a Catholic, who had brought
with him a full equipment for saying Mass, and recited
Office even when on horseback. It was something of
a douche after this, to be snubbed by a shopman who de-
clared that despite the cassock Mr. Benson must be a
clergyman, not a priest. . . .

"A subject," Mr. Molesworth writes, "in which we
were both interested at that time was Community Life in
the Church of England. And we used to talk about its
growth and possibilities a great deal. I remember he
then considered the Cowley Fathers' system as too rigid
and severe, not quite human enough, perhaps not quite
enough English. The Mirfield life had also not then
appealed to him. But he was attracted by the picture
represented in John Inglesant, and the life established
at Little Gidding by Nicholas Ferrar. We talked so much
about this as being the life in accordance with the genius
of the Church of England, that at a later date I made a
I I

I30 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

special pilgrimage to Little Gidding, and reported to him
on what I thought its possibilities."

Hugh emphasized the need of keeping the Community
quite " English," by which he says he meant " Catholic."
" We were," he writes, " to wear no Eucharistic vestments,
but full surplices and black scarfs, and were to do nothing
in particular."

At Damascus, however, something of a thunderbolt
did fall. The Guardian reached him even there, and told
him that Father Maturin had been received into the Church.
The man who had given him, for the first time, a vision
of Christendom and an intelligible scheme of dogma had
transferred his allegiance to that See whose voice, Benson
afterwards declared, was even then calling him, and being
disregarded.

His return to England and to Kemsing was, in effect, a
flight. Hugh's advent, as I said, had been arranged almost
immediately after his father's death. The vicar of Kemsing
was the Rev. T. Carleton Skarratt, a clergyman of much
refinement and culture. He held out great attractions to
Hugh Benson, promising him not only a moderate income
over and above his board and lodging, but two rooms for
living in, the " yellow bedroom " and his own study, provided
that he were still allowed to see parishioners there privately.

" I would give you," he wrote, " a free hand with the
children, as until now I have never been able to trust
them to anyone else — the Kemsing [? morning] school
wants, too, more system and method. Also, there is the
day school — a most important field. We have 196 children
in the day school, and 120 in the Sunday school."

He has been, he adds, coaching children for a
" Eucharist," but has been obliged to give up young men
and boys, and alludes to the "much sin and ignorance.

AT KEMSING 131

and still more indifference and hardness of heart " Hugh
would discover in the village. Much "patience and for-
bearance," he also reminded Hugh, would be needed in
"the extreme test to us both of living together," and re-
commended a simple rule of life and prayer to which
both should adhere. "There is no lack of organisation
here, as you know," he optimistically declared, " but co-
operation is necessary."

Hugh therefore came to Kemsing, which is near Seven-
oaks, and looks south from behind the shelter of those
chalk downs over which the Pilgrims' Way, running from
Winchester to Canterbury, passes. A church has stood at
Kemsing for some thousand years, and St. Edith, natural
daughter of King Edgar, was born there in 961. At St.
Dunstan's stern behest, the King founded an abbey there,
whose abbess she became, as well as secondary patron,
after Our Lady, of the parish. The church was restored
in 1260, and oak beams of that period still remain in it, as
well as a very ancient wooden door, with its fifteenth-cen-
tury bolts and hinges, and a marvellous Saxon or early
Norman font. Saxon, too, are the walls of the nave, with
many faint traces of frescoes still apparent. The fifteenth-
century glass of the cast window remained intact till 1826,
when it was broken, I am told, as ^' too papistical " ; one
glass medallion of Our Lady dates from 1220. Another
medallion, the Benson coat, was given by Hugh Benson.
The screen is fifteenth century, but the superb loft and
figures and the appointments of the sanctuary are modern.

Hugh was fascinated with the place, and decided, as he
always will, on arriving at a new locality with which he
falls in love, never to leave it. . . .

"This is a most charming place," he writes in May.
" You would love it, I think, as a peaceful country vicarage,

132 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

with a large garden. There is a perfectly beautiful church
just below the house ; the churchyard joins on to the
garden. And there is a decided Conservative population.
It is not unlike Addington in the tone of the people. . . .
Most of the big people are away, for which one is thankful.
"As far as I can see, I wish to stop here the rest of my
life. It is pure bliss in every way."

And to his mother he wrote :

May 2, 1897.

My dear Mamma, — Here I am at last. It is all per-
fectly heavenly. . . . Archie [Marshall] has appointed him-
self sacristan of the church, and I have appointed him,
most unwillingly on his part, catechist for the children.
Also, we are going to start and edit a parish magazine
together. I have just come out from a children's service,
and am preaching this evening.

Of all people, I met Beth at Victoria. She had guessed
at my train and come to meet me, and is looking brilliantly
well. " Eh, now ! tell your mamma that you have seen
me." But I had to hurry away, and couldn't talk to her
for more than a few minutes. . . .

I am afraid you are having horribly hot weather. I
wish we could give you some of the cold wind here. I am
wearing Jaeger, but there is a divine blue sky. You must really
come down here soon. We have our first children's Euchar-
ist on June n, and Frank is going to compose at once a
special service for them. But you mustn't come for the
first ; you must come when we have seen that it is all right
in every way. But some time in June again there will be
another.

The C 's aren't here. One dreads horribly making

the acquaintance of everybody. Everybody is a meaning-
less blur at present — all exactly alike. One can only divide
them into dark and fair.

We have got a Confirmation in .this church on Wednes-
day — the second since the Reformation.

There are all kinds of people always turning up ... so
there is a deal of company.

My rooms here are lovely : I have turned Mr. Skarratt
out of his study, and Frank out of his bedroom. I must be
getting some of my furniture down this week.

I am going up to the Eton Mission this week, I expect,
for a rehearsal of the pantomime.

AT KEMSING 133

It is all so perfect that I sit and smile with delight at
Mr. Skarratt and the Marshalls, with the expression of an
earnest Christian, and they smile back.

We had a lovely crossing from Calais to Dover ; and I
ate roast mutton, thank you, in the cabin, and then smoked
cigarettes on deck. Some people, though, were ill. — Ever
your most loving son, Hugh.

Even much later, as a Catholic, he invited a friend to
pass with him, on a walking tour, through Kemsing :

Skarratt and his house and church ! [he cries]. They
are too beautiful ! And he is exactly like Napoleon
Bonaparte, painted red ; and the Wooden Man of Boulak.
He also has an Italian garden, and a choir that sing like
seraphim.

It is quite true that Hugh's life there was extraordinarily
pleasant. The Vicarage was relatively luxurious,* and its
hospitality was generous. Hugh was surrounded with
friends : Mr. Archibald Marshall was living in the village,
and his brother, Mr. F. Marshall, in the Vicarage itself.

Besides these, there was afterwards present M. Alexis
Larpent, who from his home in Paris, and despite his grave
infirmities, has most generously sent to me his reminis-
cences of Hugh.

They date from early in 1896, when M. Larpent was
at Addington. He is a patristic scholar, and was assist-
ing the Archbishop in seeing his Si. Cyprian through the
Press. He arrived on the day of the " Household Ball,"
and at dinner, which was served in the Chinese room, he
met Hugh, who was full of the Eton Mission and danced

^ When I visited it, the late summer had stripped the grounds of their best
glories. Still, round the many lawns, on the terraces, and in the Italian garden,
roses and purple clematis and huge tufts of sweet peas and smoke-blue flowers
looked gorgeous against yew hedges, clipped into fantastic forms, and in the
tiny ponds crimson water-lilies burned.

134 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

energetically the whole evening through.^ M. Larpent,
who ccinfesses to " une certaine frayeur de ce que Ton
appelle social work," could not be persuaded to talk to
Hugh even by the news that the young cleric had written
piously on St. Bernard. He carried away with him, how-
ever, an impression of happiness and purity, and of a
certain radiance of spirit, from his brief encounter.

Two years later, M. Larpent went to Kemsing to ask
Hugh for a MS. of the late Archbishop, dealing with the
Apocalypse, which Hugh possessed : Miss Benson had
begged M. Larpent to look through it. Quantum mutatus !
Hugh was dressed in a cassock ; he wore a crucifix in his
belt. He was intent upon that '' catholicising " of the
parish at which he hints in the Confessions. He had to
travel warily. The rector and himself used Hnen vest-
ments, lights, and wafers, but only at the early cele-
brations. At midday the squire attended, and the
squire, though kindly, was Low Church. Yet the Euchar-
ist was already dear to Hugh, and he suffered from this
accepting of persons. Once, to the village's amaze, he
carried the sacrament from the altar to the sick. He
read the service slowly and with pauses — a habit he
afterwards repudiated — and sometimes wearied (as a
Kempis feared might happen) those assisting. A clergy-
man declared that he was selfish at the altar. M. Larpent,
who had been educated in that Catholic faith to which
Hugh watched him, later, step by step return, had re-
tained intact his love for the Mother of God, and gave to

^ Hugh more than once alludes in letters to his loathing for dances, the
likelihood of which, indeed, can lead him to refuse invitations to sojourns, pleasant
else, in country houses. After a dinner, too, he writes to his mother that he
finds he hates young ladies more than he thought possible. ... I believe that
like many people, for all that, he enjoyed dancing, hateful in prospect, once
he had begun to dance.

AT KEMSING 135

Hugh that icon known as Our Lady of Perpetual Succour,
in which the instruments of the Passion are presented by
angels to the contemplation of the Divine Child and His
Mother.

Hugh's churphmanship, in these circumstances, raced
upwards. He goes regularly, four times in the year, to
London for confession, and is congratulated by his con-
fessor on his Catholic instincts. He joins the English
Church Union, the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacra-
ment, and the Guild of All Souls. For all that, he con-
sidered himself a stalwart anti-Roman. The English
spirit was what he boasted of, possessed in the seventh
century by the national Church before she joined herself
to Rome, and in the sixteenth, after she rejected the papal
tyranny. In the older edition of the Litany, Hugh found
a petition which delighted him, " From the Bishop of
Rome and all his detestable enormities good Lord deliver
us." The Greek Church was still the subject of applause,
and the Italian Mission of contempt. Hugh chuckled
with glee when he perceived that, on the occasion of
the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Thanksgiving Service, held
on the steps of St. Paul's, the coped bishops wore, if not
real mitres, at least a headgear of glittering, though varied,
types. The papal legate would have to tell the Pope how
the Bishop of London had on a " superb gold skull-cap
which was very nearly as good as a mitre." And he was
delighted when a clergyman in the crowd was mistaken
for a Roman priest. How one recognises here the forced
and rather nervous banter of younger men, " smart " even
in their religion, and offering as yet no clue as to the
direction in which their maturing instincts are to carry
them, nor even whether their instincts will mature. . . .

In Hugh, however, there was no fear lest deeper

136 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

thoughts should not prevail. The charm of ritual itself
gave him from time to time the sick apprehension that
possibly it might be but a drug. The chancel brass of a
certain pre-Reformation priest, Thomas de Hope, had
irony in its glance.^ The papal decision against Anglican
Orders moved him less indeed than might have been
expected, but left him with a " bruised sensation " in his
soul ; again, he was made to feel himself something of an
"outsider." . . . Above all, he was feeling (M. Larpent can
recall) that the sobriety of Anglicanism lacked fire and
the will to soar. . . . Hugh realises that even the work to
which he here gives himself lacks, as did the Eton Mission,
something that he is seeking. He took delight in the
choir, which in Mr. Marshall's hands reached a perfection
quite extraordinary in the circumstances — for Kemsing
was but a small community of villagers ; and the plays
to which he gave himself heart and soul were a remarkably
civilising influence. I speak of them briefly, from the
dramatic point of view, below ; here I will but emphasize
that they were no trivialities, like the Rose and the Ring
of Hackney. Music, orchestra, scenery, costume, and
even professional training were so perfect that, says
Mr. A. Marshall, Hugh could keep up his performance to
crowded houses for a week, people coming from all the
country round, and even from London, to see them.

The children came eagerly up for rehearsal and for
training, and as the time drew on for the great week, we
had them with us almost all day and every day. It had
a remarkably good effect in softening their speech and
their manners, and in raising their intelligence. In this
small village, after the first rather rough performance,

* "It is the oldest half bust in England," and may date from 1340-1350.
Thomas de Hope died at Kemsing in 1347. He occurs in The Coward, and
indeed Medhurst village, there described, is a rather severe caricature of Kemsing.

AT KEMSING 137

there was never any difficulty in finding young actors and
actresses of surprising ability for the chief parts, and the
thirty or so who took part were all much more than com-
petent. I have since seen several much advertised troupes
of village players, but in the third play that Hugh wrote
for the Kemsing children, they were far and away better
than any of them. If he had stayed on there, I am sure
that the Kemsing village players would have become re-
nowned throughout England.

Perhaps the list of pencilled names of Kemsing children,
wishing him good-bye, are among the tenderest relics
bequeathed by any part of his life.

" He had a simple and direct way with children," writes
his brother, " equally removed from both petting and autho-
ritativeness. His own natural childlikeness came out ; and
indeed all his life long he preserved the innocence, the im-
pulsiveness, the mingled impatience and docility of a child
more than any man I ever saw."

Reference to his work among children occurs almost at
once in his letters to his mother, which " give so exactly,"
she writes to me, "the stir and sparkle of him, and his
almost childlike delight at a beginning like that. . . ."

Mr. Skarratt and I do various things. I have not done
much visiting yet, but I have been to a few houses with
him. But I have begun to teach in the schools, and it is
wonderful how different a day school is from a Sunday
school. The cane looms behind, and that makes an im-
mense difference. Besides, in this place everyone seems to
have a natural awe for clergy. Everybody bobs when they
meet me, just as if one was a lord duke riding through
tenants' cottages.

By the way, Mr. Skarratt has told me to ride his horses
whenever I want. He keeps two lovely black horses. And
I have been learning the bicycle. . . . [This letter is much
illustrated.]

Preaching, too, was a gift which then began to reveal

itself.

<' Everything," writes Mr. A. Marshall, " that he said

138 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

had been well prepared beforehand, and he did not depart
from it, though he seemed to be preaching extemporarily.
He spent most of his mornings writing out his sermons
and preparing his addresses and school lessons. I would
go up sometimes and find him at his desk, which, however,
he would occasionally leave to go into another room where
there was a piano, or to read a few pages of a book in
which he was interested, or for a few minutes' talk. I
never remember him at any time so deeply absorbed in his
work that he disliked being interrupted or interrupting
himself. He had the power of rapid concentration, or he
could never have produced the amount that he did after-
wards in the midst of all his other activities. When he
had written his sermons, I think his system was to read
them over several times to get them fixed in his head. But
he did not learn them by heart or prepare for any ela-
borate effects. Nor did he study oratory at all. What
eloquence he had was natural to him, and was based upon
interest in his subject and his impetuous habit of mind
and speech. As his mind became more stored, his need
for self-expression greater, and his powers of speech more
flexible, he might have been expected, from the signs he
then showed, to become a great preacher." ^

Later on, this developing gift will lead him, after taking
part in a parochial Mission, to look to regular mission work
under Canon Carter, the Canon Missioner of the diocese.
Quite apart from the fact that the Canterbury Chapel,
where he would have ministered, was to have none of that
ritual which alone, he now believed, adequately expressed
the faith he held, his plan came visibly to nothing after
half an hour's talk with Archbishop Temple, "kind, but
peremptory." He was told he was too young, and he went
back to Kemsing.

But well before this the old desire for community life
had been taking shape. Mr. Molesworth, as was said

1 He modelled himself, M. Larpent thinks (though I should say the obedience
to a model was unconscious), upon Lacordaire ; and Hugh praised the Vie de
Ste. Madeleine by that writer, " livre faux et pervers," as M. Larpent judges it.

AT KEMSING 139

above, had been visiting Little Gidding. To him Benson
wrote one or two letters, which I quote almost in full :

Thb Vicarage, Kemsing,
Aug. 26, 1897.

Dear Molesworth, — Thank you so much for your
letter and most interesting account of Little Gidding.
How glorious it all sounds ! My heart burns within me.

I do wish a brotherhood could be managed there. The
ideal would be that the patronage of the living should be
vested in trustees — that is the only safeguard. I would
come like a shot, after a little longer time here, if you
thought there would be a chance of establishing a brother-
hood there ; and I believe I know two or three people who
would come too. But I should have to stop here another
year first. Do make inquiries and see what could be
done.

One would have to get clear what one's intention would
be there. Would it be to work parishes that the Bishop
wanted temporary help for — or to take Missions in the
diocese — or to make a "Novate Novale," ^ as there is in
the Canterbury and Lincoln and, I think, Truro dioceses ;
or all three of these things.

Will you really find out about it all, and write to me
again. It has been my ideal for years.

I am going down to preach at Canterbury on Sunday
evening next. My heart sinks within me — I shall prob-
ably be dumb when I get to the pulpit. — Yours ever.

Kemsing Vicarage, Skvenoaks,
Oct.^, 1897.

Dear Molesworth, — I am sorry about Little Gidding ;
but on thinking it over, I fancy that I should not be able
to go there for a year or two in any case, as I feel I do
want more experience and more hard work, physically,
before settling down to the life that you describe. I agree
with what you say, very much, about the devotional aim
of the Society there — a kind of backwater, not in the stag-
nant, but in the peaceful sense, where people could rest
if necessary.

I have been approached with regard to my accepting
a living, but I have quite decided not to do so until I

^ A Society for Mission Priests founded by Archbishop Benson when
Chancellor of Lincoln in 1875.

I40 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

have been at least three years in priest's orders. And that
will not be till Christmas year.

Your predecessor is coming down to preach at our
Harvest Festival next week. I forget whether you have
met him. He is a rock of faith to many rich people in
London — extraordinarily holy.

I am tired to death of Harvest Festivals ; I have lately
preached at four. They puzzle me dreadfully. At their
worst they are purely pagan ; at their best they are a
substitute for Corpus Christi Day. For the latter I think
they are most useful, as one has really no fixed oppor-
tunity for urging the duty of Communion. ^

The Little Gidding scheme of course fell through
(though powerfully stimulated by the example of the
Anglican nuns at East Mailing, where High Church prac-
tices obtained to an extent as yet unexperienced by Hugh),
but there was a moment when the possibility of joining
a brotherhood founded by Canon Mason suggested itself
to him. It was the Community of the Resurrection, how-
ever, which finally riveted to itself his aspirations.

This Community had been founded by the present
Bishop of Oxford when, as Canon Charles Gore, he was
head of the Pusey House there. After a brief sojourn at
Radley it migrated to its present home in Yorkshire. At
the time of which we are telling. Dr. Gore was living in
the Little Cloister, in Westminster, ''an oasis," writes M.
Larpent, " de pri^res et d'^tudes dans I'abbaye morte."
To him Hugh presented himself as a probationer with
the Archbishop's permission to resign his curacy. Some
opposition was offered by his family on the grounds of
his impulsiveness and inexperience of life and of the

* Hugh caricatured this theory of Harvest Festivals in the pitiless sketch
of Mr. Stirling in The Sentimentalists. Mr. Stirling found that the loaves used at
such festivals carried all the " teaching " of Corpus Christi, without its materialistic
associations.

AT KEMSING 141

ministry. I summarise a letter of the Canon to Mr. A. C.
Benson, written on July 9, 1898 :

I dare say your estimate of your brother is the true
one. ... I told the Archbishop and your mother that I
preferred a man to have had more parochial and general
experience than your brother has had before coming to us ;
but that I wished to admit him, partly because of his own
strong wish — so strong, it seemed to me, that to refuse him
would be an over-great discouragement to him . . . [the
Canon insists on this at some length], and partly because
I thought he greatly wanted the discipline of study and an
ordered life. On this ground the Archbishop allowed him
to resign his curacy in order to come to us.

I am sure that he ought to be admitted to a year's
probationary discipline. That will be purely to the good.
[The vows, he reminds Mr. Benson, are only '' yearly," and
"our life is very much not an 'enclosed ' one."]

I do not think one can take the place of Providence in
arranging when, or under what circumstances, sorrow, sin,
and failure are to enter into the substance of a man's heart
and life. But I would not have you think that our life is
sheltered from contact with these as they exist in ordinary
human lives.

Mrs. Benson wrote to Mr. A. C. Benson on July 12, 1898,
that this letter of Canon Gore's "expresses so much my
own feeling in the matter that I probably like it better than
you do. It is difficult to see what else Canon Gore could
have done, as Hugh is distinctly his own master, and, you
see, it doesn't bind him to anything, and it is true he wants
* an ordered life.' "

On the same day M. Larpent wrote to Mr. A. C. Benson
a letter which is doubly illuminative, for our knowledge of
Hugh, and of Hugh's environment :

July 12, 1898.

My own theological position is extremely orthodox, but
as I am an antiquarian, the consequence is that I am
extremely moderate in all my views. Yet^ I should not
object in the least to Hugh's opinions or formal sacer-

142 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

dotalism and vows of celibacy if your brother could do
what Plato calls, BcSovaL Xoyov. ... If I could convince
myself that he has kis own philosophy of life, his own well-
reasoned conviction, supported by well-defined arguments,
his own system of thought and conduct, I should withdraw
at once all my objections. What alarms me is that he has
made up his mind, and does not give the reason of his
determination. Of course he gives some reasons, but I do
not feel that they are his own.

I am sorry he is not sensitive and receives advice with
complete pa6vij.la. When I saw him at Kemsing I implored
him to spend a few years quietly reading some of the
books which the Archbishop left him. I wanted him to
do a Cyprian of his own. But he reads not ! I deeply
love him, and I am greatly honoured by the confidence
which he places in me, but I feel powerless. You are quite
right in not doing more than you have done. He must
try that sort of life. But between you and me, my dear
friend, it is distressing to see that his quest of celibacy
will after all be decided after a short novitiate. It involves
the philosophy of a whole life. I do not know Gore. I
hope he will not advise ev Kv^oa. . . .

P.S. — Of course you fully realise what a consolation it
would have been for me if I had found in him a student's
mind ! He might have begun a great work, the work of a
whole life, and I should have been so happy to help him at
the beginning ! Fancy studying TertuUian with him, or
Augustine ! The personal grief is real, but after all I want
him to be happy and follow his own way.

Hugh had refused a good offer of a living, explaining to
his brother that he needed discipline, was far too comfort-
able, and was going to succeed in missionary rather than
in pastoral work.

His brother asked him, in return, whether

he might not perhaps find the discipline he needed in
doing the pastoral work which did not interest him, rather
than in developing his life on lines which he preferred, . . .
But I did not understand Hugh at this date. It is always
a strain to find one whom one has always regarded as a
boy, almost as a child, holding strong and definitely matured

AT KEMSING 143

views. I thought him self-absorbed and wilful — as indeed
he was — but he was pursuing a true instinct and finding
his real life.^

Still, from Hugh's own letters, it may be, we shall
obtain the best expression of that point of view, at least,
which he offered to the public. He wrote — the letter has
no date — to his brother :

. . . Thank you very much for your letter about my
going in. I certainly agree that in a very large number of
cases a call is contrary to inclination. On the other hand,
is not a parochial life also a matter of call ? It seems to
me that the clerical life is either a married life or a
community life. I feel from every conceivable point of
view that I am not called to a married life — the neutral
ground that lies between that and a community life is as
equally impossible — and to me, therefore, the community
life seems normal, not abnormal at all. I do not quite see
why it should be regarded as abnormal by everyone. It
is not the monastic life proper, but the secular, surrounded
with peculiar aids to devotion and study. . . . And the fact
that one's inclination is on the same side is scarcely a solid
argument against it. To use it as an argument reminds
me of a certain sentence in Arthur Hamilton^ that per-
secution is not a proof that God is on our side. 1 mean
the fact that a life is pleasurable is no indication either
way very much. ... I will do my best to disentangle what
I want from what I will.

Finally, to Mr. Molesworth he wrote as follows :

The Vicarage, Kemsing,
July 22, 1898.

My dear Molesworth, ... I am not sure whether
I told you of my future plans. It is now finally settled that
I enter as a probationer in the Community of the Resur-
rection at the end of September. I go into retreat with
the brethren on the 26th, and then go with them to Mir-

' Hugh, p. 92.

^ Arthur Hamilton was a book written by Mr. A. C. Benson in 1887 under
the pseudonym "Christopher Carr."

144 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

field. It seems to me that this Community entirely satisfies
one's desires. They are not so rigid as Cowley ; there
seems to be a more family spirit among them ; and I admire
Canon Gore, the Superior, extremely.

I have often wondered whether your thoughts had ever
turned to that Community.

May I ask your prayers for me in this new life ?

Here we are in a great fuss and hurry — another chil-
dren's pantomime coming off next week — and the house
is full of dresses and golden crowns. I hope it will go
off well.

Things go on here much as usual. I am terribly sorry
to leave, for some reasons, but have no doubt that I am
doing right.

There is undoubtedly distinct discipline at Mirfield, and
I don't know how far one will stand it. This house is extra-
ordinarily pleasant, but extraordinarily undisciplined. No
particular rules for anything in the world. It will be a
sharp change.

The world is rather tumbling about me altogether. The
priest to whom I go to confession is getting married, and
I am wondering whether I shall continue to go to him.
I fancy not — particularly, as I shall be up in the north for
so long.

Do send me a line to wish me well.

I think too much fuss is being made about this " Crisis "
in the Church. I don't believe a " Crisis " exists at all ;
and if it does, whatever of it does, certainly is all for the
good, and leads to sobriety and quietness. Personally I
should not be overwhelmed with sorrow if a few priests
seceded to Rome. It would be bitter for the moment, but,
I have no doubt, would lead to more fruit in the future, as
to respect for authority. — Ever yours,

Hugh Benson.

Hugh therefore left the pleasant places of the south
for the unlovely Yorkshire town. He went in search of
discipline to a house which he was destined to leave in
pursuit of an authority yet more comprehensive. Kemsing,
with its delightful occupations, was allowing him, he felt,
to squander himself almost as a man of grosser bent wastes
himself over pleasure. Mirfield will be unable to provide

AT KEMSING 145

for his intellect that direction which its restless, yet timorous
character demands. He leaves the village where his indi-
vidualism had perhaps had too free a scope, and his self-
development had risked turning into self-indulgence : he
must plunge into community existence and sink his
aggressive personality in the general life. Yet none can
say that at Mirfield he succeeded in reducing himself to
" type " : perhaps at Mirfield, and indeed there especially,
there was no type to which the orthodox should conform.
Certainly Hugh never became typical of anything at Mir-
field, any more than he had been one in type with Mr.
Skarratt, M. Larpent, or, earlier, Mr. St. Clair Donaldson
or Dean Vaughan. With all the enthusiasm, but with less
than the pain which Francis Thompson prophesies for the
artist, " he lived his life ; he lived his life."

CHAPTER VII
MIRFIELD, 1898-1903

Quelque chose de calme, de pauvre et de fort enveloppe la coUine. Tout est
clair et parle sans artifice a I'ame. . . .
Et la chapelle r^pond :

— Je suis la regie, I'autorit^, le lien ; je suis un corps de pensees fixes et la
cit^ ordonn^e des ames.

— J'agiterai ton ame, continue la prairie. Ceux qui viennent me respirer se
mettent d poser des questions.

Mais la chapelle nous dit :

— Visiteurs de la prairie, apportez-moi vos r^ves pour que je les epure, vos
^lans pour que je les oriente.

Maurice Barres (Za CoUine Inspirie).

I

The house to which Hugh went in September, 1898, is
built on the high ridge which faces south across the valley
of the Calder. Mirfield is on the junction of the London
and North-Western and the Lancashire and Yorkshire
Railways ; other lines run through it : Leeds, Huddersfield,
Wakefield, Bradford, surround it. Over the whole land-
scape, save when rains have washed it, a film of soot has
settled. In rain itself, it is dismal beyond words. Yet the
scene has its fascination. At sunrise, Turner would have
worshipped it ; in almost any weather. Whistler would
have loved its fugitive effects. At night, the whole valley
is romantic with the green and crimson lamps of signals
and the rush of trains. There are spring or autumn after-
noons when the sunlight, quivering in the birch and
mountain-ash trees, numerous all around, transfigures

the whole country-side. Benson, like all artists, was

146

MIRFIELD, 1 898-1 903 147

sensitively aware of the qualities and variations of light.^
" It is a divine spring evening," he writes from Mirfield
in April, 1902, "... all smoky and hazy in brilliant
sunshine. I love days like these."

As you climb the long hill from Mirfield or Battyeford
station, it is the dark red stonework of the unfinished
Community church which you first meet upon your left,
projecting towards the hill-face. This Benson never saw.
Below arc the buildings of the Theological College, which
were begun during his stay at Mirfield. Then comes the
house itself, approached through lodge-gates by a drive.
It was built by an opulent mill-owner, and its architecture
is entirely characteristic of the district. The Fathers
have to submit to walls of a pale stone which blackens
rapidly ; slate roofs ; windows surcharged with ornament,
and porches flanked by columns of a livid-coloured marble.
The new refectory and the added wings for guest-house
or for retreats, are of rougher stonework, and in a Per-
pendicular style at once more simple, more graceful, and
more dignified.

Solidity and warmth, however, cannot be denied to
the older building : the entrance hall, with its staircase
and gallery, are generously designed ; the corridors and
rooms are in no way unlike those of most modern religious
houses which have been added to bit by bit.

The house, then, is fenced off from the road by the
orthodox flower-beds, lawn, and trees ; on the valley side,
a terrace is succeeded by fields and then woods as far as

* Perhaps his consciousness of light was developed hy John Inglesant. Often
you will find Shorthouse's phrases almost verbally reproduced by him, especially
when it is the " mellow radiance " of afternoon which soothes him, or the light,
held, as it were, in solution by the air of dawn, which intoxicates him. But his
fether too had had this sympathy with light. He is always noticing, and noting,
it. In his diary, 23rd March 1850 has this only entry: "The strange light on
the old Court after Evensong."

148 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

what is a genuine cliff-face of rock, and, at one point of
this, confronting the seething life beneath it like any
Calvary of Breton or Spanish coast, stands a tall crucifix.
To the left lies a quarry, and to the right the ground falls
rapidly into a kind of pocket in the hill, and here, sur-
rounded on all sides by rocks and trees and brambles,
no sign of human interference anywhere visible, a man
might in a moment put himself into retreat. That Hugh
came here often is certain, since he went to the trouble
of making a path and steps up to the higher levels, still
called "Hugh's Path" by those who remember it, for,
with the cutting of a wider track, the use and the memory
of the humbler stair are disappearing, and the work he did
upon the hillside is half hidden by the brambles.

Below all this lie the road, the blackened river, the
canal, the branching railways, the huddled stony town.
Then the valley rises into its further slope.

Within the house Hugh Benson found, doubtless, the
discipline he needed, and yet in no sense an austerity of
life which quenched his spirit. Modern religious con-
gregations tend, I suppose, to increasing the rigidity of
their original organisation rather than relaxing it ; and
Mir field, which to-day is Lazarist, so to say, in tone, was
then (as a Cowley Father put it) Oratorian rather than
monastic, and was animated by a family spirit which,
with the gradual strengthening of its tissues, has not
wholly evaporated.

The Community in Hugh's time rose at 6.15 ; at 6.50
the Prayer-book office of Mattins was recited, followed
by a version of Prime. At 7.15 the Eucharist was
celebrated by one member only of the Community, for,
in the intention of the Mirfield Fathers, the social aspect
of the common Oblation is thus emphasized. Breakfast

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 149

followed, in silence; Terce was said at 8.45, Meditation
followed at 9.0. This was made, as a rule, in the Chapel
or in private rooms ; Hugh characteristically preferred
the garden. Dinner at 1.15 followed Sext at i.o ; tea
was after None at 4.15. Evensong was said at 7.0 ;
supper was at 7.30, Compline at 9.45, and the lights were
officially extinguished at 10.

This was the order of Hugh's day, and it has not been
altered substantially in our own. Its setting, however, at
least as far as the religious services are concerned, has
changed considerably. In May, 1902, a new chapel was
being made, Hugh's own room with two others being
thrown into one for that purpose. When the big church
was sufficiently advanced, the Community resorted to it
for their devotions, and these are now said in a special
chapel there. When it is completed, chapels of the
Nativity, the Holy Cross, the Resurrection, the Ascension,
and the Holy Spirit, will make a crown about the High
Altar ; to-day, only one other altar, that to which Hugh,
in the old chapel, was accustomed, stands in the nave.
A plaster statue of Mary holds forth the Divine Child for
worship, and lights flicker before the crucifix. In this
sombre, somewhat Byzantine church, the usus Anglicanus
obtains, which is not exactly Sarum (a ritual to be seen
in its splendour at, for instance, St. Agnes, Kennington),
but is accurately based, we learn, upon the use in a
majority of pre-Reformation English parishes. Hence
artists among the brethren can satisfy their eye with
vestments of rich penitential blue ; and Lenten white, too^
is noticeable at Mirfield. Hugh designed two altar-cloths
in these tinctures : the white one bears upon it the
heraldry of the Passion, appliqud in sombre red ; the field
is goutti with great drops of blood. Over the crimson

ISO ROBERT HUGH BENSON

background of the other spreads a great tree of life in
blue ; the same escutcheons hang from its branches, and
the legend tells how the tree of death has borne a fruit
of life. This ritual itself developed slowly. Coloured
vestments came in owing to Benson's help ; the Lambeth
" opinions " governed the use of incense ; a sanctuary lamp
was lighted, annoyingly, to Benson's logical view, for it
shone sentry to no tabernacle.

Silence was more strictly observed, as in most Catholic
communities, from the end of evening "recreation" till
after breakfast. On the other hand, there was no rule
for the putting out of private lights ; and it was jokingly
said that in the morning nothing in the world would get
Hugh out of bed "but the sound of one of the Fathers
saying his prayers in the bathroom." From breakfast
to dinner " lesser silence " was to be observed ; that is,
conversation was to be brief and on necessary subjects.
With all the good-will in the world, Hugh never could
carry this out. His neighbour's door would be agitatedly
opened, with or without a knock. Hugh, who had just
written something he liked, or in whose brain some sudden
idea had taken fascinating shape, would invade the worker.
" I say, just 1-1-listen to this. ... I say, isn't this
r-r-ripping." " Hush-sh," would come the answer. " Yes,
I know," Hugh would urge, " but 1-look here . . . just one
minute." And the excited talk went forward.

After dinner, the probationer would retreat to his room
with one or two special friends, and then, over the fire,
"discuss the situation," as he called it. Certainly his
tongue was sharper than he allowed it to be in later years ;
yet he was noticeable for his unaffected geniality and good-
will. Much tobacco, in the shape of halved cigarettes,
soothed his nerves, till he resolved to rid himself of this

MIRFIELD, 1 898-1 903 151

chain. He chewed seeds, and all manner of strings and
straws, to make up for the companionable drug. " By
the way," he wrote, half-way through 1902, " I am giving
up smoking. Haven't smoked a whiff for four weeks.
But I won't swear it is for ever." Indeed it was not.
From Rome he will write that he considers himself as
good as " cured " ; he only smokes one cigarette or so
a day. Before he dies it will be thirty or even fifty.

After the conversation, exercise. He plays a childish
cricket, and fives in the stable-yard. He was a difficult
person to play against, one of his companions told me
plaintively. He was an expert ; and, when one failed to
make one's stroke, he jeered, and quickly became " purely
vituperative." This exuberance of spirits found an outlet,
too, in rapid walks and much digging up of plantains on
the lawn. " Come and d-dig ! " he used suddenly to say,
when the silence got on his nerves ; and, in flannels and
an immense straw hat, he wrestled with the weeds, piously
termed by him " original sin," for mere human effort found
them ineradicable. A baptism of acid was devised, but
proved inefficacious, and they still are there. He dug,
too, the path mentioned above, and steps down to the
quarry ; and in September, 1902, he wrote to a friend in
India :

It is good for people to dig, I believe. I am almost
superstitious about that — good for their characters, I
mean — you feel that you have reached fundamentals
when you are sweating over a spade and your hands are
sore.

I would include that kind of thing in the education
of every boy I had to do with. Talking of education,
there is a real row on, and the Dissenters are really
behaving exceedingly badly — lying right and left. They
have degenerated shockingly — quite unlike their fore-
fathers.

152 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

The whimsically spiritual interpretation, and the evocation,
by a word, of an idea else not associated with his theme,
are wholly characteristic.

Beside these .labours of love, a certain amount of
housework was general. The brethren made beds, broke
coal, cleaned boots. For dress, they wore a loose cassock
with a leather belt ; and though the head of the Com-
munity, as long as Dr. Gore held that position, was known
as " Senior," the name " Superior " soon came in, and the
other priests were called " Fathers," in modern fashion.
Benson strongly urged this change. A monastic element,
too, was noticeable in the weekly " Chapter," when faults
against the Rule were confessed publicly by the brethren
on their knees.

At Christmas, Father Benson sent to his mother a
number of "Christmas Cards" sketched in pen and
coloured chalks upon half-sheets of notepaper. The
rather chill buildings of the monastery figure twice, and
are more seriously drawn ; most of the sketches are
humorous, and display, in kindly caricature, the daily
occupations of the Fathers. A sturdy " Hebdomadarius,"
in black coat over his fluttering nightshirt, hair touselled,
feet red-slippered, jangles his bell down the bleak corridor ;
cassocked figures shave in bathrooms ; carry brooms and
pails down the same green-doored passages ; sit, with
heads plunged in newspapers, in an austere breakfast-
room, or bowed above theological treatises in the library,
or hasten, " late again," towards the relentless door. For
"dissipation," they are pictured as playing battledore and
shuttlecock over a clothes-line hung with newspapers for
nets, cassocks temporarily laid aside, or, three by three,
with uplifted finger pointing their theological debate,
patrolling the village street, where the very dogs pause to

MIRFIELD, 1 898-1903 153

contemplate the pious spectacle. " An Appalling Scene in
a Modern Religious House " seems to display the " walling-
up" of some refractory monk by two British workmen,
shocked and stolid respectively ; black-habited inquisitors
in the background urge on the work.i In two mysterious
companion drawings, a bishop is first seen, writing his
" charge " at a table on an overhanging and crumbling
mountain ledge. A workman with a gun, and a black-
coated, top-hatted figure — is he a Nonconformist minister ?
— holding a huge life-preserver, stand behind him. A
distant Pope beckons another layman and a birretta'd
priest to Rome. In the second picture, the workman has
fired, his companion has hurled his life-preserver, the
rock has split, and the Bishop with all his paraphernalia
is sent flying. From afar, on the road to Rome, two tiny
figures look back to the catastrophe.

These relics have their pathos. They may serve, too,
to show that Hugh could stand back and see himself and
his companions in all the quaintnesses incidental to their
nobly-chosen life, and could defy all alien laughter by
having been himself the first to laugh; and, best of all,
that in his own laughter there was no slightest note of
bitterness ; his caricature is of the kindliest ; the desire to
hurt never stirred within him ; he was, for the time, at his
happy ease in the Mirfield Sion.

This first year was almost wholly spent in prayer and
study, though we find traces of slight external activity. He
gives a lantern lecture on the Holy Land in aid of the
" Jerusalem Fund," and foresees another on Egypt, for

^ An unfinished sketch, called " Paid by the Day," shows another group of
workmen drawn with a genuine sense of character, value of line, and firmness of
touch. The rest are still the work of a clever schoolboy with quick eye and
supple though untrained hand.

154 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

which he will have to " read up Baedeker." ^ And on
March i, 1899, he writes to the Rev. J. H. Molesworth,
apropos of a recent Anglican controversy :

We English bark a great deal. It is better than vicious
snarling. I really do not think there is very much vice on
either side, though a terrible lot of dust and noise. We
shall all be sitting with our tongues lolling out presently,
smiling at one another. I am barking in my poor way at
my Men's Bible Class ; but they won't bark back — they
only grin like a dog, and take it admirably.

His strictly theological and historical studies we shall
describe later : in literary works of two or three depart-
ments he was always interested.

During his years at Mirfield the books he mentions are,
of course, John Inglesant, and with this, what became for
him a kind of pagan Inglesant, Walter Pater's Marius
the Epicurean; and, indeed, quite apart from the some-
what similar pilgrimage traced by these two young men,
singularly refined, sensitive, and open to religious experi-
ences in either case, towards the practice of Catholicism
and of Christianity respectively, as magical a light broods
over that picture of the Rome of the Antonines as upon
the England of John's day, and few can escape the
glamour diffused by Pater's prose.

" I read Marius the Epicurean^' he writes, '' in the
holidays — for the first time, I am ashamed to say. What
a marvellous book it is 1 I desire to be a pagan." He
turns this off lightly, with an allusion to an old professor
in Athens, relegated to an asylum because he offered
sacrifice and incense to Apollo and Athene in his domestic
lararium — " a really charming old man, I expect " ; but the

^ Not till next year did he give, with the Rev. C. Bickersteth, an itinerant
mission in Cornwall, playing devil's advocate to his companion's expositions of
dogma, though some assign it to 1899. Here is the motor-mission foreshadowed.

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 155

influence went deep, and, when a Catholic in Rome, he
will passionately beg that Marius may be sent him, in any
form, from England.^

He loves this mixture of realism and glamour. In
the spring of 1902 he had been to Ulysses at His Majesty's.
Stephen Phillips, he considers, is

really good ... he writes always on the large, simple human
emotions — such as homesickness and jealousy of the
simplest kinds — and isn't in the least elaborate or subtle ;
and his words are suitable — large common words carefully
arranged.

It was charming to get into complete unreality again.

In keeping with the last sentence is the following, written
the same year :

I have been reading Maeterlinck much lately. Do read
every line of him you can lay your hands on, but above
all his plays. They are wonderful — very morbid and odd
and French, but really moving, not like Ibsen's fiddling
stuff.

I am quite sure that, had he seen Ibsen acted, the
horrible heresy he here expressed would have been re-
nounced. His love for Maeterlinck, on the other hand,
had he seen Pellias et Milisande when he was taught to
appreciate Debussy, would probably have grown firmer.
As it was, he wrote in June, 1903 :

I have read a lot of things lately — Maeterlinck, for
example. He is, I believe, a sort of fever that one catches
and recovers from ; but my temperature has been rather
high about him for some time ; and shows no lowering.
He seems to me a writer full of extraordinarily delicate

^ " I am slowly tasting Marius through once more. What a book ! And would
you kindly, sometime, state your views as to John Inglesant? I find that a
master-key to people. Or, in another metaphor, it precipitates a solution." He
wrote this in 1905.

156 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

perceptions. The very dullest things become significant,
with him to describe them. I wonder whether you agree
at all.

He had also been reading, "very mildly," George
Sand ; whose name everybody " seems to have babbled
from their cradle upwards, except me." She too, he
finds, transfigures the commonplace ; but not like Maeter-
linck, by making you feel that there are huge, mysterious
Powers behind, but by making the very things and
characters themselves interesting, quite apart from their
" significance " and " symbolism."

Huysmans too, and to a lesser extent Zola, seemed
to him to achieve this transfiguring effect, though Huys-
mans did it the more easily, as he "puts the whole thing
into a mystical frame." He knew, but had not, I think,
read his Lh-bas, nor Zola's less reputable works. In con-
sequence it is hard to gather which of the latter author's
books he could have seen, save, probably, Lourdes, and
possibly Le Rive ; later, he read more of Huysmans beside
La Cathtdraky including Lh-bas, though he resisted for
a long time. At last he yielded to the argument that, as
a priest (especially if interested, as he was, by Satanism
and the morbidities of worship), he ought to. He bitterly
reproached his counsellor ; his visualising brain tormented
him with the pictures of impiety it had offered, and his
crucifix, at Mass, became for a time a torment. I do
not think he ever read A Rebours. Had he done so, or
even its English legatee, The Picture of Dorian Gray, his
character-drawing in The Sentimentalists might have been
done with a firmer hand. Sir Richard Calmady, too, was
a book with definitely morbid elements on which he found
his views too complicated to write.

Not that his reading had throughout this sicklied cast.

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 157

He thoroughly liked Kipling, and studied On the Heels of
De Wet, though this depressed him, and he found the
Boer War " a dingy affair " ; he was " thankful for one's
country's credit that it has somehow managed to stop."
His sense of humour was often riotous: he "laughs
himself sick" over stories which he records, sometimes
twice, in letters, to the same person, and which need his
inimitable telling to seem comical ; and he had an un-
chastened taste in Limericks. His love for the occult is
still there :

"We told ghost stories," he writes to India in May
1902, "last night till prayer-time — and I nearly had a fit
with fright when I found myself alone in my room — with
ghostly curtains round my bed [an absurd goblin is sketched
in the margin, peering between two curtains]. I expected
them to be parted by bony fingers, and a face to look
through. And there were curious thumpings in the hall
at II P.M. that terrified me.

"My eldest brother has lately written some mystical
stories which he has asked me to criticise.^ They are quite
fascinating. Do you like that kind of thing ? Or are you
too stegling and blowsy and healthy ? "

Later on an attempt will be made to judge how far
he took these impressions seriously, and how far he
laughed at himself and them. Certainly, at this very
time his healthful love for animals was as keen as ever.

"Last week," he wrote on March 11, 1902, "I went to
the Zoo with my brother. We had a splendid time — tipped
keepers, and were taken behind the scenes. We had a
cheetah's cage opened and scratched his head, and con-
versed with a perfectly mad lion who was being kept in
the dark. We tapped his cage from outside, and he
positively foamed with rage and banged against the iron
plate. It was like touching a button and letting off an
explosion instantly. Then an ape spat at us insolently
several times. ... It is a most fascinating place."

^ The Hill of Trouble.

158 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

He also went to hear some music " as recreation," but
chiefly wants more Zoo, and spends lunch-time in the
South Kensington Museum with the stuffed birds, and a
little later gleefully writes :

We are going to have a dog at last ! I am so pleased —
an Irish terrier, and we have lately grown a rabbit on the
estate — I am afraid they won't hit it off too well. He is a
real wild rabbit who has appeared, and who feeds on the
lawn in the evening. But I yearn for a parrot — that would
put the gilded pinnacle on my hopes.

The Irish terrier used to sleep under Father Benson's
bed, and developed "a passion for flies whom i he eats
in a gentlemanly manner off my window-pane. But they
are not good for him." Yielding, however, to a darker
passion for poaching, the dog, to Hugh's grief, had
shortly to be got rid of.

Yet even in the innocent life of bird and beast he
would not refuse the stimulus to dwell on the uncanny.
From Tremans, one July, he wrote that he had been
listening to

owls hooting and snoring at night. I love the sense of
mystery that owls give one. We used to sit out and watch
them after dinner, going like cruel ghosts after mice. Once
or twice they appeared against the west sky, silhouetted,
with a mouse in their claws.

Of literary work during this first period, I doubt
whether he did any (save, of course, the preparation of
sermons and the like) other than the edition of his
father's Prayers and Services.

He had begun this before actually going to Mirfield,
and a letter from Mrs. Benson survives in which she
begs him to submit the manuscript to some one of a
liturgical temperament who was also an intimate friend

' Is it childish to notice the personifying pronoun ?

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 if9

of the Archbishop's, and suggests Canon Mason, as
having been " inside." He was helped, too, by the Rev.
J. Julian, who wrote the notes to the Archbishop's hymns
and translations in the famous Dictionary of Hymnology
from information received direct from their author. The
book appeared to his friends, as in the Preface he
surmised it might, somewhat miscellaneous, not alone
from the nature of its contents — public prayers and
offices, private prayers, hymns — but from the somewhat
vague and perfunctory character of the notes. Perhaps
the book was rather rushed. Possibly the son lacked,
not the admiration for the liturgy, but the scholarly
knowledge of ancient prayer-forms which the father so
amply possessed. None the less the book has a per-
manent value as throwing light on certain aspects of the
Archbishop's piety with which the English public, a
very unliturgical body — certainly not likely to think of
praying in Greek at any rate — could not, probably, be
familiar.

Of his spiritual and even intellectual development
during this period little evidence is available. A small
black note-book contains accurate outlines of all the
Quiet Days and Retreats he made while at Mirficld, from
January 4, 1899, onwards. But these are strictly resumes
of the " points " explained by the giver of the Retreat,
and, though interesting as a proof of the lofty ideal and
of the mystical method set before the exercitant, they
contain no hint of Hugh Benson's personal reflections
or conclusions. The names of Fathers Bull, Sampson,
Nash, Frere, and, especially, Charles Gore, recur at the
head of these pages ; and it is to their biographies that
an account of these ascetical exercises would properly
belong. In themselves, these "days of recollection" and

i6o ROBERT HUGH BENSON

retreats differ in no substantial way from those to which
Catholics are accustomed. Another note-book contains
Meditations on the sacerdotal life and spirit, arranged
for ten days. They are built strictly on the Ignatian
lines ; two preludes, three points, and a colloquy. These,
I confess, seem to me, from, purely internal and stylistic
qualities, to be, if not original, at least written down
more freely according to Hugh's own temperamental
dictates.! " Intercessions " were a regular feature of
Mirfield life, and followed Sext. This habit of regular
and official "intercession" left a lifelong impress upon
Hugh. Certainly it stimulated his interest in Miss H. M.
Kyle's book. Bands of Love, spoken of below, and inspired
his last small volume, Vexilla Regis, written after the
outbreak of war in 19 14. In a small prayer-book entitled
Sursum Corda, by Mrs. A. L. Illingworth and the Rev.
W. H. Frere, and brought out on October 20, 1898, to which
the present Bishop of Winchester had written a preface,
he notes down the main anniversaries of his life, and adds
lists of initials, partly of persons, partly of pious enter-
prises, to the schemes of intercession included in the
prayer-book. He inserts prayers to Mary for the Holy
Souls, a picture of Our Lady, and a naively painted
Chalice and Host for frontispiece ; and it is clear that
his prayer-life is already fully Catholic* In fact, he tells
us so himself in his Confessions (p. 67), adding that he
said his Rosary regularly. This, I should indicate, neither
was nor is a regular Mirfield custom, but a practice

1 The Rev. G. W. Hart reassures me that they were practically original.

* Three sermons belonging to this period survive : on Christmas, and its
implied reversal of human standards of judging ; on the corporate life of the
Church ; on the law of retribution. They are written throughout, with
additions, but practically no erasures. Their theology is orthodox ; their style
still contains too much of the "And nextly," "And then again," of the con-
ventional preacher to be attractive.

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 161

which, if not forbidden to the individual, would not be
encouraged, still less officially sanctioned.

Hugh Benson had been admitted as Probationer, with
the Rev. Samuel Healy, who remained his very intimate
friend, on October 4, 1898.^ By July, 1899, therefore, the
year of Probation was running out, and the question of
Profession rose above the horizon. By Profession was
meant the taking of the three standard vows of poverty,
chastity, and obedience, understood in this sense, that the
candidate made a solemn promise to observe the rule of
the Community for thirteen months, and declared his
intention of remaining in the Order for life. These vows
then contained no more essential permanency than did
this intention : if this should flag, no dispensation was
necessary, but departure could take place automatically at
the end of the period of months. It could also be allowed,
imposed, or refused before this. The vow of obedience
was understood in the usual way : external obedience was
required, save when conscience genuinely protested ; in-
terior obedience was expected within the limits imposed
by each man's psychic temperament. By chastity, celi-
bacy was meant. There was no suggestion, I gather, that
marriage attempted in defiance of this vow was null and
void.* Poverty implied that a man's capital remained in-
tact to him, but his income was handed over to the
Community. The dictum, moreover, Quidquid monachus
acquirit, monasterio acquirit, was recognised : books written
at Mirfield remained a source of revenue to the house ;

^ This is the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, to whom he had from these early
days a genuine devotion. He regarded him as the pattern of that childlikeness
and simplicity for which, as his letters show, he was constantly praying.

* Mirfield, a lady penitent of Hugh's considered, was " a sort of prison where
clergymen are made to do as they are told, and generally humbugged." " No,"
Father Benson answered, "I am a monk, and cannot marry." I fancy this
sarcasm was quite unconscious.

I L

1 62 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

thus, The Light Invisible proved lucrative long after its
author's disappearance. Beth, Mr. A. C. Benson tells us,^
used to make him little presents, and " at intervals lament
his state of destitution." " I can't bear to think of the
greedy creatures taking away all the gentlemen's things."

In 1899, however, Benson did not feel himself in a mood
suited to profession. He continued, therefore, experi-
menting, and embarked upon a life fuller of external work
than he had hitherto attempted. From almanacks and
letters it would be almost possible to reconstitute the
list of places that he visited. After his retreat at Selwyn
College, Cambridge, from September nth to 15th, it is
Harvest Festivals and isolated sermons in the neighbour-
hood of Mirfield that are at first noted ; he preaches
twice in the open air near Huddersfield ; and gives a Mission
of one week at St. John's Church, Sevenoaks. During it
he preached daily to children at 9 a.m. ; at Evensong at
5.30 ; and a special Mission sermon and instruction at
8.30 P.M. From November 6 to 23 he spent his holiday
chiefly, I think, at Tremans. No engagement-book for
1900 seems to survive ; but his apostolic experiences during
this and the following years had nothing of peculiar in-
terest ; they increased steadily in number, and became
probably more definitely " revivalistic " in character. They
are, in fact, often enough actually called " Revival Weeks " ;
he deliberately read Talmage^ before preaching, in order
to " work himself up ; " and the mingling of Catholic dogma
with Evangelistic fervour (which caused a certain clergy-
man to delight him by speaking of his preaching as half
Wesleyan, half Romanist) remained with him, in a
chastened fashion, all his life. He used gestures at
this period far more than ever he did as a Catholic, and

* Hugh^ p. 97, * The famous American Evangelical preacher.

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 163

envied one of his colleagues ^ his amazing power of posi-
tively acting the Passion story as he told it.

There is no doubt that he enjoyed his variegated life to
the full. He exults, often enough, in the prospect of
returning to the peace of Mirfield, but after a fortnight's
stay there he would grow restless. He gleefully writes
round, in December, 1901, that he is staying in the Bank
of England at Manchester, " for four sermons at St. Ann's."
These followed a revival week at Wellingborough, and
from January 19, 1902, he will have continuous work
till Easter. On January 25 of that year he writes to his
friend in India :

I am working like two horses ; and whenever I have
not anything else to do, sleep heavily in a chair. An
endless vista of work stretches up to Easter, talking and
talking. Just at present I am on a mission in a little
country church — dull, heavy people who sit and stare and
then go away dazed. They need an earthquake, and I
can't give it them. I think I shall bust before I have
done.

He describes the country rectory with enthusiasm — an
old spired church at the back —

with tombs and Easter sepulchres and aumbreys and
piscinae — and all the rest. But it smells of the dead —
— and there I stand and rave three times a day at least.
Southend is only a mile or two off, with its beastly parade
and pier and band.

This lament over popular indifference recurs, in his
correspondence, almost like a refrain.

On August 22, 1902, the Rev. G. H. S. Walpole (now
Bishop of Edinburgh) wrote to him :

... I should be appalled (if I saw it more clearly) at the
general indifference to the existence of a spiritual world.

1 The Rev. S. Healy.

i64 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

To some, not vicious people, I believe it would be a posi-
tive relief if I could announce next Sunday that there was
no such hope. As for any realisation of danger in sitting
thus loosely and carelessly I see not a trace. The opinion
Carlyle is credited with, is, I expect, widely common.
" As for Jesus, he was a good young man disgusted with
the shams and hypocrisies of his time which his soul
couldn't abide." And yet such people are pleasant,
agreeable, and interesting, very likeable and very much
amused when the parson gets hot and presses home
conviction.

In March Benson writes again :

Work is accumulating very much. I have engagements
for nearly two years ahead — and feel as if I were caught
in a machine and were being slowly drawn in. Do you
know that sensation ? The only thing to do is not to
think about it.

But the '' treadmill sensation " is often enough alluded
to by him. Already on December 6, 1901, he had written :

The thing that one finds most trying in this work is the
fact that one has to be "on the spot" every time. One
can't do it in a routine sort of way. If one is just in a
kind of dull level, one had better not be there. Parochial
clergy can make up for a slack fit afterwards — and we
can't. That really is a great strain. One gets to a place
and has instantly to be at full steam and remain so until
one goes — and that is trying to body and soul.^

None the less, when his activities could take on the
colour of an adventure, even unpleasant, he revived.
Open-air preaching was at once terrifying and exciting to
him. In the July of 1902 he wrote :

This month we begin preaching in the Quarry : and I
am terrified to know that I have to take Sunday week.
We have a brass band — and other pranks.

^ In this same letter he alludes to a grievance destined to prove lasting :
"X. looks a lot older. I wish I did: I have been informed of my youthful
appearance twice to-day — and the second time by an aged man with a long
beard — which especially annoys me."

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 165

On September 25, he was just back from Lincoln :

tired to death. Street-preaching every evening — followed
by a sermon, &c., in church. We had such large and
attentive crowds. The colliers stopped at once the very
smallest attempt at disturbance ; and then a good many
followed us into church.

An interesting sidelight is thrown upon his work
at this time by the Rev. C. Hart, now of St. Ninian's,
Whitby :

"I went," he writes, "on a Mission with him to St.
Patrick's, Birmingham, in 1902. I remember how he
dreaded it beforehand and was nervous ; how he semi-
hypnotised three young fellows who came in one night and
sat in the front row to sneer ; how he gave out the hymn,
' Faith of our Fathers,' with this appended remark : ' By
those fathers I do not mean Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer,
and that kind of person ! ' Probably nobody in the con-
gregation except the clergy had heard of any of those
divines. At the same Mission, after a few days of seem-
ing failure, the people began to come up in flocks night
by night, quite steady and unexcited, to renew their
baptismal vows ; and he and I spent the last few days of
the fortnight in church all day long seeing penitents, and
only making flying visits to the clergy-house to snatch
cups of tea. I can also remember being upset at first to
find that after some very powerful and earnest sermon,
he would at once adjourn to the house and begin reading
a ' shilling shocker ' with all his might ; but I found that
it was his way of giving a sedative to his brain, and that
if he had not done something of the kind, he would have
been too much excited to sleep, and so the next day's
work would have suffered."

He expresses a preference he was destined to mortify
often enough in late years :

I agree absolutely about bazaars. They are terrible —
they are dishonest — undignified — silly — and, above all,
tiresome beyond words. If I was going to give to an
object, I would much rather give, than be swindled. I
can't see the attraction at all.

1 66 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

If I may venture an opinion upon this period of ex-
ternal activity, it shall be that within it all he is making
definite progress towards the spiritual and the interior.
At first there are too many letters of the following descrip-
tion :

Jan. 26, 1900.

... St. Paul's was quite gorgeous. Five copes ! [There
follows the quaintest sketch of four beehive-like personages
approaching a candled altar.] Four of the copees had not

anything particular to do, but the fifth. Canon K , was

celebrant. Beethoven in C : " O Saving Victim "
(Gounod), " Hail, Festal Day " (Minor), and " Urbs beata."
I nearly wept for joy. Two altar lights and two standards
— a fairly large orchestra who went out in processions like
the " Hegemoth " or something of King David. A vast
congregation with comparatively few communicants.

The following card was written (in a Latin emancipated
from any obligation, it would seem, of following " ut final "
by the subjunctive) from Market Harboro' on March
22, 1901 :

Gratias tibi ago, frater, pro epistola tua, hodie accepta.
Moeror praesertim de doloribus tuis : sed equidem tam
defessus sum ut tibi, etiam, invideo. Catarrham ctiam
in capite tam tumcfactam ut mortuus esse desidero.

Omnia spiritualia tamen bene satis progrediuntur. De
Poenitentia elocutus, pavidus sum, sed poenitcntes et
salutem esurientes expecto. Processiones per vias, non
sine cruce luminibusque, furorem populi excitaverunt :
nee sine lictore in pacem scrvandam procedebamus. Sed,
benedictione Dei et protectione B.V.M. et Patroni Hugonis
omniumque Sanctorum salvi fuimus e iracundia protes-
tantum : et omnia tranquilla sunt. Ora, frater, pro
nobis.— H. B.i

^ Thank you, brother, for your letter, received to-day. I am especially sorry
for your woes ; but on my side I am so tired that I actually envy you. [I have]
too a cold in my head, so stuffed up that I wish I were dead.

However, all spiritual business is going on well enough. I spoke on Penance,
and am very frightened ; but I am expecting penitents and men hungry for
salvation. Processions through the streets, not without cross and lights, excited the

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 167

There is still too much of the young ritualist about this,
who feels himself playing at a rather naughty game,
calculated to tease the rival clique.

Together with this rather frivolous preoccupation with
ritual went what I can only allude to at the risk of hurting
those for whom Benson himself felt, and expressed, a
lifelong admiration and gratitude. That I should feel
a little uneasy about the attitude of these missioners (in
those early days) towards the practice of Confession,
implies no kind of reflection upon the utter sincerity and
self-devotion of the Mirfield confessors, nor do I want to
attribute any essential value to the personal impression
left on me by the letters of this period. Still, I cannot
forget Benson's own description of the first confession he
ever heard : how he led the unlucky Eton boy who made
it into the Kemsing church, locked the door, "trembling
with excitement, heard the confession, and then went back
to the house with a sense of awful and splendid guilt." ^
Possibly. To defy Church authorities in ritual may indeed
savour of naughtiness and, at times, of flippancy ; but
to enter a Confessional, unprepared, unsanctioned, no
question of examination, of faculties, or jurisdiction having
even been raised, might indeed provoke a sense of guilt,
though scarcely " splendid." The touch of excitement is
felt in all these letters, that anxiously ask " How many
confessions did you hear ? " " Did you shrive anyone ? "
" Above all, try to beat up some confessions." Amateurish-
ness in the confessional is supremely out of place. Now
at least it will be agreed that, however wrong Confession

fury of the people ; nor did we " precede " without a policeman for the preserva-
tion of peace. But, by the blessing of God and the protection of the B.V.M.
and of my patron St. Hugh and of all the Saints, we were saved from the wrath
of the Protestants, and all is quiet. Pray for us, brother. — H.B.
^ Confessions, p. 54.

1 68 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

as a practice may be, the Church of Rome has an accumu-
lated experience, and a tradition of extreme antiquity,
a moral theology patiently and minutely elaborated and
laboriously instilled into her Levites, which preclude much
danger of amateurishness. Even so, it is normally with
terror that the young priest enters for the first time his
Confessional. Moral theology is even yet not officially
taught, I gather, at Mirfield. That Benson conscientiously
made a digest of all Lehmkuhl, omitting (as he entertainingly
records) the sections on the Sovereign Pontiff as " irrele-
vant," was exceptional. But he undoubtedly felt the need
of training, and grew noted among two or three special
friends as a very clever casuist.

This note, as I most diffidently submit, of amateurish-
ness made itself clearly heard in a case when he suggested
to a sick penitent that she should receive Unction.

June 22 (1902).

Personally I am so ignorant about it all, that I dare-
say it is quite wrong even to suggest it. But I cannot
help fancying that a Christian would have a right to claim
it in illness, quite apart from being in extremis. But it is
difficult to get, and might be quite wrong.

He consulted Father Frere, and wrote on July i, 1902 :

There are apparently two methods of blessing oil — (i)
Western, which must be consecrated by a Bishop, or,
under certain circumstances, by seven priests ; (2) Eastern,
which is not consecrated at all, but is taken from a
lamp that burns before a holy image. Secondly, there
is the development of its use which ends in Extreme
Unction — and there is also the original practice, which
was a kind of Catholic Faith-healing.

Father Frere agrees that it is perfectly within the rights
of a Christian to avail himself of this second use, so long
as he is really ready to accept God's will. Father Frere
also adds that while he would prefer a Bishop to bless it.

MIRFIELD, 1 898-1903 169

yet that he would not scruple to use oil blessed by a
priest, if he could get no other.

However, Father Benson promises to try and get some
oil blessed by a Bishop in Scotland, if his penitent will
try to get a priest who will consent to use it, and ends
by recommending her to put herself " in the correct dis-
position " of resignation, and also to disregard her people's
view that her illness was " nervous." '* After all, the doctors
know."

I feel convinced that I shall not even be suspected of
smiling at those Anglicans who are trying to restore to
customary use those Sacraments which they recognise to
have lapsed as part of their ecclesiastical life ; it is, one
may say, Mirfield's programme to Catholicise England
through the Sacraments , and Father Benson's spiritual
direction, which from 1901 we are able to trace consecu-
tively, was firm and wise, no less than enthusiastic. Ten-
tativeness is a quality which, even at the beginning, it
would be hard to find in it ; and Father Waldegrave Hart
has told me that what surprised him not least in so young
a man as Benson was his sureness of spiritual touch.

II

From his whirlwind activity abroad, Benson used to
return with infinite content to the haven of Mirfield. It
is a great thing to possess a " haunt of peace," even if you
use it chiefly as a repairing-dock in view of further excur-
sions. But he really loved it, and by far the surest proof
of this is that, during this period, even in his home he felt
himself somewhat a fish out of water. Later on, when the
change which, it might have been feared, would create
a final severance, had been made, the atmosphere of

lyo ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Tremans was to him dear beyond most others. But in
December, 1902, he could write :

. . . The life here, which I love, makes one stupid in
any other circumstances, and I can't fit in therefore at all
with my people. ... It is rather dreary, but so it is.

His attitude towards his associates at Mirfield was
characteristic. He could be enthusiastic, but he was by
no means undiscriminating. On certain days when the
house was full of clerics, assembled for "quiet days," or
the Hke, he would escape to a friend's room. " Save me ! "
he would exclaim as he burst in, '<too many b-b-lack
clergymen about." When, after the confusion which
attended the election of Canon Gore to the Bishopric of
Worcester in 1902, a new superior was finally appointed
to the Mirfield Community, Benson wrote ecstatically of
him that he was

a lean man, a theologian, liturgiologist, hymnologist, scholar,
musician, preacher, athlete, and a saint ! It is a good
list, and he excels in each item, and withal a very
pleasant human person.

On the other hand, it was after an encounter with one
of the brethren who got badly " on his nerves " that he
had to wrestle seriously with himself in soul, and wrote
thereupon the verses entitled In the Garden of a Religious
House.

He regretted immensely the disappearance of his
Cambridge friends, yet never had he, I imagine, quite so
sharp a tongue as at this period :

" It seems to me quite extraordinary," he wrote to his
correspondent in India, in 1902, "the way one has lost
sight of people one knew at Cambridge. Really you are
almost the only person I know now."

" It's really awful," he wrote again, a good many months

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 171

later, " the way I have lost sight of everybody I ever knew.
With one consent they have ceased to pay the smallest
attention to my existence, and I to theirs."

To a few he alludes by name :

"Yes," he wrote on March ii, 1902, of a man whom
he had just called " a really good sort, of a kind" :

Yes, undoubtedly X. is the "fat, big, good-natured
youth." He always was that. It is a just revenge on Y.
that he should have married an Oxford barmaid. He was
a quite unspeakably odious boy. I don't think I have ever
met such a worthless person. Z. is probably very nice by
now. He was very funny as a boy. I remember his once
telling me at the age of fourteen that he smoked, " not be-
cause he thought it grand, but because really he couldn't
get on without it."

He mentions the death of Dolling — "a really great
man in his way " — but glides off at once on to the general
moral aspect of the situation, applied quickly to himself ;
" I wish I was him now. Death is a queer thing — terrible
and desirable."

A unique sentence appears to me to be the following :
"/ am glad you don't like A. B. C. [the italics are mine.]
He is a tiresome man. I expect a rather upset man too ;
after this . . . crisis." For the dignitary in question was
likely to find himself locked out of a position on which
he had speculated. On the whole, what Benson, I think,
most of all disliked, was spiritual uncouthness, loudness,^
and self-satisfied stupidity. (The " stupidity " which were
better called " simplicity " he prized beyond pearls, even
when it made him slightly irritable ; but this irritation
he whole-heartedly condemned. He never condemned his
hatred for cheap cleverness.)

^ " X. has gone to Scarborough ! Can't you fancy him . . . with a cigar ? in
a rakish hat ? winking at young ladies, and calling the barmaid ' Miss. ' ' Sweaty
'ot to-day, miss, ayn't it?' With a malacca cane . . ." A cruel little sketch
accompanies this skit on one of the more austere of Mirfield's brethren.

172 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

He mentions a recently-appointed prelate, and declares
that he is an excellent example of conspicuous mediocrity ;
and therefore acclaimed loudly by the Church of England.
"True gentility," says an eighteenth - century maxim,
" forms no convictions, and is never demonstrative."

He is what one must call astute ; and it is a poor thing
to be. " Be good, sweet Prelate, and let who will be
clever." That is really true, I think. Surely astuteness in
spiritual things nearly always ends by falling into the pit
that it has elaborately "digged for others." However,
stupidity in spiritual things is nearly as disastrous. The
real secret [he adds dryly] is, of course, to find the golden
mean, such as you and I pursue. A really stupid good
person rouses me to a kind of frenzy. I met once a really
good and stupid Quaker. I love the idea of Quakers, but
not their reality ... at least if this was a specimen. I
have hardly ever wanted so much to destroy anybody.

His own occupations pursued themselves quite placidly,
and, of course, the drama — children's drama — could not be
neglected. In the January of 1900 a Children's Pantomime,
The Beauty and the Beast, was acted in the Mirfield school-
room, and he proposed, I gather, to act it again, in 1902,
in the Quarry. This, however, never happened.

"The Pantomime was a great success," he wrote on
December 29 :

I was stage-struck again — as I always am, and began
to wish I wasn't a clergyman, in order that I might act
myself. And I always fall deeply in love with the leading
female characters — which is unfortunate for a monk !
However, I have torn myself away. But they look so
beautiful, all rouged up and eyebrowed, behind the foot-
lights.^ They are scarcely of an age to be married yet —
about thirteen, is the eldest; and they haven't an "h" in
their entire repertoire, and say " oi " for " I," and so on.
Still they are exquisite creatures.

^ He " made up" the children himself, and enjoyed it immensely.

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 173

At a dramatic moment, the "Beast" was to be laid
out, with a pall and candles, as dead. There was a
moment of nerves — the candles had to be removed, lest
the villagers might find them "Roman Catholic." Next,
one of the more romantic lyrics had its tune altered :
the Baptists used it as a hymn. Finally, the expression
"Go to blazes" had to be expunged, in deference to
pious ears, possibly intolerant of this remote allusion,
even, to eternal fires. Hugh never became quite patient
with their susceptibilities.

Besides these more secular avocations, he displayed
an intermittent and rather perfunctory interest in
foreign missions. As early as July, 1901, he had asked
an Indian civil servant for information concerning Indian
missions, to be incorporated in a book a Mirfield Father
was writing. He preached for the S.P.G., and spoke,
later on, with sympathy of the Community's new house
in Johannesburg. For the "Children of the Church,
King's Messengers," a department of the Children's
S.P.G. Missionary Association, he even produced, at re-
quest, a Syllabus of Instruction, comprising skeleton
lectures on the lives of Bishops Field of Newfoundland,
M'Dougall of Labuan and Sarawak, Callaway of St.
John's, Kaffraria, George Selwyn of New Zealand, and
Edward Bickersteth of S. Tokyo, with references to the
standard works upon them. But he did not enjoy it.
"All my spare time," he writes, "is occupied in trans-
lating hymns . . . and also in writing dreary Sunday
School lessons on the subject of foreign missions. Poor
stuff, I am afraid." He characteristically suggests that
the lessons should be driven home by tableaux.

Besides these translations of hymns, he wrote a few
poems, published at the time in the Pilot, which never

174 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

refused his offers.^ These afterwards formed the bulk
of the collected Poems published in 1914 by Messrs.
Burns & Oates. He had only consented to their ap-
pearance in order that any proceeds of their sale might
be devoted to Mr. Norman Potter's Homes, of which
I speak below ; and indeed their appeal, unless I err,
lies chiefly in the personal note — here, pleading upon
the whole and pathetic — which he managed to infuse into
nearly all his writing. There is in them but little passion,
and, perhaps, no very high poetic inspiration ; they are
at once less academic, but more restricted in their
appeal than, say, The Christian Year; they have none of
the substance of the Lyra Germanica, for instance, nor the
fresh whimsicality of George Herbert's pious and very
personal poems, which Hugh never really loved, nor
anything at all of the rapture of a Francis Thompson,
whose joys and anguish tore his soul to pieces. Yet all
these names have they, by qualities allied or contrasted,
recalled to memory. Undoubtedly it is the still wistful,
recalcitrant, searching soul of a man known to most as
so bright, buoyant, and skiey, which appeals to the
reader even where literary perfection is absent. The
first poem and the carol are those, perhaps, which move
us most.*

^ When the Pilot perished, " Why is it that parties succeed," he asked, " and
that sincerity doesn't ? "

* Besides these, he made an effort in Latin versification, on the finding of a
stirrup in the foundations of the old Mirfield stables then being turned into the
nucleus of the new College. He suggested :

En ! schola equile instat ! strepitus sic denique mundi

Caelorum paci cedit ; — et hocce manet !
Sit monstrum tibi, terrarum ut peregrinus ab orbi

Ad caelestem urbem vivere, serve Dei.

He gleefully sent these, his first epigram since Eton, to Mr. A. C. Benson, who
returned it with some not uncalled-for comments. The epigram is now inscribed

MIRFIELD, 1 898-1903 175

Besides this, he assisted a personal friend and penitent
to produce a book of Intercession entitled Bands of Love,
She began it in 1901, and gave the manuscript to Father
Benson in 1902, who, joining the imprimatur of another
member of his Community to his own, returned it for
publication. It was accepted by an ecclesiastical pub-
lisher, together with Father Benson's preface ; but owing
to the dilatoriness of those responsible for its appear-
ance, it was only just published when Benson became
a Catholic. This action of his led to the withdrawal, at
the publisher's request, of his preface. After some sin-
gular negotiations, the authoress's name too was with-
drawn from the title-page of the book, it was Anglicanised,
a new preface was written, and it reappeared as the
property of those to whom the wearied lady had pre-
sented the book.i Benson's help had been practical — he
was ready to give hints as to type, italics, the advantage of
assertions over questions, and the Hke ; but also I con-
fess that he showed a tendency to remodel the substance
of what was submitted to him to perfect. Those privi-
leged to have studied under that unique scholar. Pro-
fessor Robinson Ellis, late Corpus Professor of Latin at
Oxford, must remember how his infinite delicacy of touch
could transform a man's most mediocre composition into
a masterpiece. Perhaps this displays a still greater

beneath the stirrup, which hangs inside the main entrance to the College, and
runs as follows :

En ! schola pellit equos : strepitus sic denique mundi

Caelorum paci cedit : et hoc superest.
Te moneat mundi strepitu nugisque relictis

Ad pacem superam tendere, serue Dei.

^ It was not wasted to her. When, in May, 1904, she went to the Convent
of Sion, Bayswater, to be received into the Church, the nuns found that it was
she who had written a book lent to them some weeks before, and for the conver-
sion of whose authoress the sisters had been praying ever since. It was Bands
of Love.

176 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

power over the matter in hand than does that forceful
recasting which reveals a personality incapable of any
self-expression short of self-impression.

Foremost among his literary enterprises is, of course,
the collection of stories called The Light Invisible. Mr.
A. C. Benson had lent his brother the manuscript of
certain " mystical " tales, afterwards published as The Hill
of Trouble, and Hugh had been fascinated.

" The last one," he wrote on May 22 [1901], " ' The Closed
Window,' terrified me for hours. What I like so much is
your device ... of making the supernatural world open
out directly from the natural. I do believe that is the
secret of effective supernatural stories."

Thus inspired, he began to write, but expected at first
to collaborate with his sister. Miss Margaret Benson.

" My sister and I," he wrote in the autumn of 1902,
" are bringing out a book called Redcap. Look out for it,
and See That You Get It. . . . It is a queer book of odds
and ends. My sister has done most of it. Many of the
contributions are true. They are short sketches of sudden
and startling events — like being nearly killed — Egyptian
things, &c. It is called Redcap for an abstruse reason
which the preface explains."

Rather later, he announces that the book will appear in
the spring (of 1903) edited by his sister, and it is to be
called Tales of a Visionary. This plan, however, fell
through, though it will be revived when first he writes the
Mirror of Shalott stories in 1904. Slightly nervous as to
how his book's religious colour might affect the reputation
or the feelings of the Mirfield Community, he wrote
a complete volume of his own "under an ingenious
pseudonym that I do not believe anyone will guess." He
signed himself simply Robert Benson, reviving the unused

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 177

R and dropping Hugh. He even on one occasion allowed
it to be surmised that Mr. A. C. Benson had written the
stories. Miss Margaret Benson pleaded for simplicity as
the best concealment, if concealment was to be at all :

Pseudonymity is a great mistake unless it must be pre-
served ; and this can't be preserved, and I don't see why
it should ... I should say, full name at once — if not,
Robert . . . Always speak the truth, especially as you may
be found out if you don't.

The stories are put into the mouth of an aged priest

whose dogmatic position was to puzzle reader after reader.

On two topics connected with this book its author was

positively bombarded with inquiries : Were the stories

true ? and. Was the priest a Catholic or an Anglican ? He

invariably answered that the stories presented themselves

as nothing else than fiction. This proved, and proves, a

disappointment to a number of people ; but the fact

remains that Benson himself never had a direct experience

of the sort he here relates, and was, in practice — save in a

kind of playful, quite arbitrary manner — very sceptical of

the real objective value of what he heard. But that spiritual

facts might express themselves somewhat in the manner

of these incidents he never for a moment doubted ;

gradually he worked up a whole philosophy concerning

this ; meanwhile he could make very excellent stories out

of the material supplied by imagination or by friends.

As for the quality of the old priest's religion, even apart

from the fact that the Anglican burial service is somewhere,

quite casually, quoted, and that phrases like <'the great

white throne " belong rather to an Evangelical mysticism

into which the Apocalypse is woven, than to modern

Catholic phraseology, I do not personally think that a

Catholic would find much difficulty in diagnosing the
I M

178 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

atmosphere, at least in so far as that it was not what he
was accustomed to breathe. Benson himself tells us that
he deliberately refrained from asking himself which he
meant the old man to be — Anglican or Catholic, and aimed
constantly at the water-line. He had at the time a theory
about the Church Diffusive, on which I shall touch below,
by means of which he was attempting to "obliterate
distinctions" within Christ's body, and to substitute for
the " contemplation of cold-cut dogma " the " warm
realities of spiritual experience." He developed a violent
and, as he himself says, "rather exaggerated dislike for
the book," ^ due to a reaction, he considers, against the
unrealities in which he was then living.

I dislike, quite intensely, The Light Invisible, from
the spiritual point of view. I wrote it in moods of great
feverishness, and in what I now recognise as a very subtle
state of sentimentality ; I was striving to reassure myself
of the truths of religion, and assume, therefore, a positive
and assertive tone that was largely insincere.*

I think he was worried, afterwards, by the thought
that almost his most popular book had such a success
among Anglicans ; and by the recollection that it was an
Anglican nunnery which had inspired the chapter called
" In the Convent Chapel," a panegyric of that contemplative
life which, he came to hold, was essentially what the
Anglican Church could make nothing of. Moreover, he
had written it when staying in the Clergy House of St.
Cuthbert's,3 Philbeach Gardens, where the Sacrament was

^ Confessions, p. 83.

- He ended by professing an entire disbelief that anyone could really like the
book, and had to be given a list of confessedly "right people" who did.

* The Abbot of Caldey, however, tells me that the idea of the nun kneeling,
so silent, yet so powerful a centre of spiritual energy, first struck Fr. Benson
when he, then still Dom Aelred Carlyle, of the Anglican Benedictines, intro-
duced his confrere to the East Mailing chapel mentioned below.

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 179

reserved ; and though at the time he could distract his
mind from questions of validity of Anglican orders, yet
afterwards he did not like to think that he had pictured
a nun's supremest ecstasy as evoked by what he had by
then come to believe, objectively, an illusion.

Finally, he once heard the book rather cruelly parodied
by an Anglican clergyman.^ He took criticism with
genuine humility, no doubt ; but was exquisitely sensitive
to what he thought injustice ; also, one sometimes grows
to hate what one has seen made ridiculous. All this
accounts for a certain anti-Anglican vivacity which
regularly accompanies the expression of his views on this
first book.

Deeper cuts his conviction that part of its theological
framework was awry. He considers himself to have
confused the essence oi faith with what he calls " sight" ;
that is, with vivid intuition, " personal realisation,"
little else, in fact, than imagination.^ He does not by this

^ So I was at first assured. Later, Mr. A. C. Benson has shown me, in a
contemporary diary, that he, too, pleasantly parodied The Light Invisible on an
occasion when each of the three brothers was chaffing the style of the others'
stories. Hugh hated this parody at the moment.

* A correspondent ran directly counter to Benson's own diagnosis. He
writes that he had said to a friend about The Light Invisible, "This was his half-
way house to Rome. It was the last cry of his soul as it turned itself homeward.
. . . His soul was starved ... it was like a little child robbed of something
it ought to have. . . . Don't you see that the whole point of that book is
' spiritual insight ' — the only real bridge between the Seen and the Unseen ? It
was not with him a question of authority — anyhow an authority which had its
objective presence in this world. He went ; his spiritual sight showed him the
way. . . . Men go over to Rome for many reasons. We condemn most of them ;
though they tell us much, they always leave out — through what I may call the
soul's modesty — ^just that exact spiritual force which finally and irresistibly drew
them. We must not so blame one . . . who when he went left behind his
lantern. Hence, the message of your book was an incomplete one, half-query,
half-cry. (Now you must be better off ! Tell me !) Won't you tell me what
your right hand holds ? The left may hold the solution of the Petrine claims,
but I don't ask your help to face them or to sharpen my emotional faculties. It
is spiritual keys I want."

i8o ROBERT HUGH BENSON

refer to such exquisite visions as that of Mary, " Consolatrix
Afflictorum," mothering the wakeful child under her blue
mantle ; nor the mere re-focussing of rabbit-cropped,
bracken-fringed glade, with its pool and pines, into the
" Green Robe " worn by Creation's immanent Lord : still
less, the odd allegorical picturing of the nun's prevailing
prayer as an elaborate machine, and herself as a financier
directing operations from behind a city desk. In short,
when Benson talks of " sight " or " imagination," he does
not at all mean what is the essential prerogative of all
visualisers, who translate every sensation and all their
memories into colour and line. Visualiser he remained
to the end, and in a high degree. The Catholic stories in
the Mirror of Shalott are as highly visualised, symbolical,
and incarnate, so to say, as ever were the Anglican. But
he feels that he has still regarded Faith too much in the
Evangelical sense of a strongly /^/^ assent rather than as
a uniquely motived assent. The Catholic doctrine of faith,
with all that department of the " supernatural " with which
it is essentially allied, more than any other eludes, as a
rule, the grasp of non-Catholics. The Catholic does not
say, I believe, because my intellect sees its reasonable
way to so believing (as, that Democracy is good, or bad) ;
still less, because it is coerced (mathematically, as it were)
into so believing (as, that the various propositions of
Euclid are true) ; nor again, I believe because, though
my intellect may be silent on the matter, or indeed con-
tradict me herein, I feel superlatively and interiorly
convinced that so and so is true : but, I believe it, because
an authority, which (reason has convinced me) is divine,
asserts it so to be. Reason, that is, has led me to a point
where it becomes right for me to assent, though I can
still, with varying degrees of culpability, refuse. Catholic

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 181

theology teaches that supernatural grace strengthens the
human will, making therefore the assent of the will and
all future assertions of the guided intellect to be super-
natural acts. Such then is, in undefended outline, the
Catholic dogma. Benson perceived that The Light Invisible
offended against this in two ways ; or rather, it did so,
and he perceived one of them. Namely, for him, intense
faith was identified with a mode of spiritual perception
latent in all men, but not yet actualised, as all men may
be supposed potentially to contain the artistic sense or
the moral sense. By developing this spiritual sense or
faculty — a development due mainly to prayer and morti-
fication — the soul becomes able to be, at choice, aware of
one or other of two interpenetrating planes of reality, the
material and the spiritual, rather as a mathematician can
at will '' abstract " from the concrete qualities of any object
and consider the ideal system of forces and curves on
which it is organised.

This kind of doctrine is to be found exposed at length
in the more reputable books upon Theosophy ; and of
course every phrase used in the enunciation of it can
be paralleled from the most orthodox of theologians,
dogmatic no less than mystical. As a whole, however,
it confuses the natural and the supernatural, and leads
to an exaggerated subjectivity.^ Corresponding to this
overrating of the subjective faculties of the soul, is found
a depreciation of those objective methods which reason
follows to reach a recognition of the divine. Intellect
appears to have nothing to do with faith ^ — no more,
at least, than the jewels enter into the constitution or
creation of the woman they adorn. Christian apologetics

1 It is most clearly expressed by the priest in The Light Invisible, on pp. 4,
5, 6, and 60. " See p. 167 ib.

1 82 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

are " entirely " inadequate. Converging lines of probability
may lead to God, but do not reach Him. Faith is the
product, not of intellectual, but of moral conditions. This
recognisably is a doctrine which leads, if pressed, to a
position known as "Modernist." A truth may be true
religiously which is not true intellectually. Intellectually
I know Christ's dust still to lie within His tomb ;
religiously, I believe Him to be risen. On the material
plane, or historically. He was Mary's son and Joseph's ;
spiritually, I possess Him as Son of God. The habitual
misinterpretation of Newman's doctrine of "accumulated
probabilities" may have led Benson to speak thus in-
accurately ; much more probably his doctrine follows
straight from his temperament, which was profoundly
idealist and intolerant of laboured intellectualism, as we
shall shortly see. Meanwhile it is wholly outside my
province to defend the Catholic position I have stated ;
I had only to show where it differs from that expressed
in The Light Invisible, and what he meant when, later on, he
constantly accused his book of confusing faith with sight.

Meanwhile the stories represent a leap full into
maturity of style and literary expression astonishing for
its suddenness. Sensitive observation, accurate applica-
tion of language suited to one sense (as hearing) to another
(as sight), and the spontaneous interpretation of sound
by colour, and sight by music, and the like ; very perfect
command of metaphor for the description of the subtlest
psychic states ; all this is as good as ever it will be.^

^ One of his most successful devices — and to be successful it must be most
skilfully used — is the picturing, so to say, of the "hush before the storm." So,
excellently, on p. 102, and, more lightly, p. 248. In The Necromancers, the
scene where Mrs. Nugent hears the dog-cart in the night, gives it you perfectly.
Dickens was fond of this device ; he used it masterfully, e.g., before the death of
Carker, in Dombey and Son, or of Montague Tigg, in Martin Chuzzlewit .

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 183

Tremans supplied much of the rather luscious mise-en-scene,
especially the garden, the gateway, and the oratory, with
its adjacent rooms. The extreme perfection of the old
priest's equipment, the apparatus of his life, is dwelt
on not too preciously, perhaps, by one who was destined
to create so artistic a shrine for his last years, within
which his soul was able, none the less, to live in such
detachment. Still, Benson himself recognised that here
he lapsed, as he was often to do, into the romantic. But
with this refined and cultured sentiment goes too a
genuine human passion. It would be hard to surpass
Consolatrix Ajfflictorum, already quoted ; and the page which
tells of the murmuring echo of a whole world's Aves,
gathered to Mary's heart under the dark blue mantle,
reaches a high level of feeling. Moreover, Benson reveals
himself endowed with the rare quality of being able to
tell an excellent tale. The Traveller is a straightforward
sound ghost-story.i Under which King is vivid, and
tantalisingly refuses us the key to the one of its many
riddles we really wanted to unlock (and this is most
Bensonian) ; in many of the chapters we find the authentic
touch of the uncanny. The ghastly face suspended in
the tree, drawing succulent delight from the murdered
thrush ; the red dog's-eyes of the damned man in Poena
Damni; the misshapen idiot boy who prayed there, on
Christmas night, in the quarry, till on the mud was shown
the tiny mark of a Child's foot. . . . Writing of this last
tale, almost shocking in its abrupt invasion of the mys-
tical by the material, Mr. E. F. Benson mentioned the

^ It was in the Gate House at Mailing Abbey that one of St. Thomas's
murderers is said to have taken refuge. It, like the Abbey, is haunted ; Father
Richards, chaplain of the convent and Benson's friend (^Confessions, p. 55), was
evicted by the ghost, and doubtless Benson was thinking of this wh^n h? wrot^
his tale.

1 84 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

" tremendous grip " ; of the book as a whole, he alludes
to " distinction and charm " as its characteristics. And
that perhaps is true ; Benson charms you — that is, unless
you are one of those whom all the time he angers — and
all of a sudden grips you. And if you quarrel with his
incidents, well, as in the same letter Mr. E. F. Benson
puts it, " To say ' I am sorry, but it happened that way,'
[is] the inalienable right of the author."

But throughout the book emerge the main ideas which
are to be Benson's themes throughout his life : the
sacramentality of all nature, taught immediately in The
Green Robe: the appalling reality of sin {Poena Damni\
and of diabolic agency {The Watcher), which have caused
the spiritual and material and intellectual planes, which
normally should interpenetrate and harmoniously co-
exist, to be, as it were, tilted and awry {Over the Gateway),
bringing it to pass that Pain is the inevitable punish-
ment divinely alchemised into the supremest remedy
{With Dyed Garments j The Bridge over the Stream), a
remedy which pure souls, owing to their incorporation
with Christ achieved by love ( Unto Babes) and prayer {In
the Convent Chapel), are privileged to apply to the race at
large, at, so to say, their own expense {The Sorrows of
the World). " In the morning " comes ' The Expected
Guest,' and Benson finishes (as in The King's Achievement)
with a sentence deliberately and even audaciously am-
biguous. " The Rector had come." ^

^ He will defend this quaint device — from a literary standpoint not unlike
Horace's quiet endings to his more high-pitched odes — as being at once psycho-
logically and religiously accurate. You constantly are not sure what an event
means, or what your own words mean ; it is, however, in keeping with the
general scheme of things that they should, to some extent, be sacramental.

When these notions are made explicit, that is deliberate and on the whole
distasteful to him. He far preferred to leave you with vague and tremendous
impressions of unseen, transcendent forces interacting, such as Maeterlinck will

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 185

The Blood Eagle is a story which stands rather alone.
In it Benson makes one of his rare excursions into a
philosophy of paganism. It is paralleled by "Father
Bianchi's story" about Mithra in the Mirror of Shalott.
The old priest, when a boy, had assisted at a singular
spectacle in a wood, which was identified, when he
described it to a Professor, as a " blood-eagle " or sacrifice
to some pagan deity, of whom the boy (though the Pro-
fessor disregarded this, being but a "Higher Critic") had
a vision. He was standing on a tumulus where these
sacrifices, originally human, had in ancient times been
offered. But the earth was still black and sodden with
the blood of the pig which he had seen escape, wounded,
and pursued by an old man dripping too with its blood,
and for which (does Father Benson give us to under-
stand ?) he was in genuine danger of himself being sub-
stituted. The story is decidedly "unpleasant," and in
spirit, as well as in setting, reminds us, though still palely,
of Mr. A. Machen's House of Souls.

"Practically everybody," he wrote on June 7, 1903,
" has either failed to understand it, or has disliked it. And
yet I think that what I meant is both harmless and true :
viz. that a brutal and filthy superstition, so long as there
is a deference paid to the unseen world, is better than the
most polished materialism. The old man and the Professor
are the pivots."

In 1900, an event occurred which might well have
altered Hugh's whole career. One of the canons of

hint at. Maeterlinck, indeed, still broods over the book ; the silhouette of
Tremans on the cover is quite obscure enough to satisfy him.

Already we catch ourselves smiling at the recurrent Bensonian turns of
thought and phrasing. " I searched furiously." " He beckoned to me furiously."
How often in Hugh Benson's letters that repeats itself — " Here am I writing
furiously — working furiously " ! And sentences begin, as in Kipling's earlier work,
so often with "Yes "or "No," implying interruptions hard enough (when you
try) to put into words.

1 86 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

St. George's, Windsor, suggested to Mr. A. C. Benson that
Hugh might be willing to accept the living of Hunger-
ford in Berkshire, which was vacant. It was a position
of importance, being well endowed, its staff of rector and,
I think, three curates shepherding at that time a popu-
lation of three thousand. It was a singularly high office to
be offered to so young a man, and was to be judged even
more by what it promised than by what it was in itself.

On June 7, 1900, he wrote from 4 Little Cloisters,
Westminster, refusing the offer.

I feel it is such a terribly responsible position — and I
am so inexperienced. . . . But the offer has had sufficient
effect on me to make me reconsider the Community question
altogether — and I have practically decided to postpone
my profession, and to ask for another year's probation.
Although I sincerely feel that I am not meant to take this
particular post, it may be an indication that I am ultimately
meant to do work of this kind. In any case the time is
not lost, as I am getting experience of a concentrated
kind that ought to be very valuable.

By June 9 he is able to write that he has definitely
renounced standing for his election in July, and on June 12
he says :

Certainly an outward invitation to take up any new
work has a great influence on one when it comes unex-
pectedly — but only when it meets a growing conviction in
oneself that that kind of work is right for one. [Such was
the invitation to go to Mirfield, such is not, that to go to
Hungerford.]

You suggest that I am wilful in this, and am " choos-
ing rather than following," but I cannot say more than that
I am doing my best to be sincere. Besides, does not
" following " convey a sense of continuing to do what you
are already doing, and "choose," a sense of starting fresh
in a way ? It seems also to be a recognised canon of
learning "vocation," that after a course of life has been
taken up, it should not be forsaken for any less strong

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 t87

reason than that which drew one to it, and I must say that
at present the balance is down on the community side —
though to speak honestly — only just.

Next day he continues :

... It seems to me there are two methods — one, the
parochial, is to live close to people and, starting from that,
to work " ad hominem " ; the other, the community life, to
live to a certain extent apart and work " de Deo " (which
sounds presumptuous, but which I do not think really is) ;
of course one does not mean that either is exclusive of
the other, but only that each has a different tendency. . . .
There is also in mission work a peculiar intensity of
spiritual touch, that while it has its dangers, also has its
extreme advantages. [He then draws his only conclusion :]
Community life is a vocation for some — is it for me ?

During the next months his reflections on community,
as compared with parochial, life issued in the following
letter to the Rev. J. H. Molesworth, on November 7, 1900.
He was at Tremans, recruiting from the influenza, which
he said he got once a week and twice on Sundays.

My dear Molesworth, — At last I answer your letter.
I have been down here convalescing for a few weeks from
various disorders, and when one has got nothing to do, you
know the way in which one does nothing. You speak
about the Religious Life — and ask me what I think. I am
quite certain that its revival in the Church of England is
from God — and that men's communities as well as women's
have a great work to do. If I may say so, I think my
testimony is worth more, as I am not yet certain of my
own vocation. I did not offer myself for election last July,
and am not at all sure yet what my decision will be next
year. But I am quite sure that there is such a vocation —
and that it is a very lofty one. There is work to be done
of a kind that no one else can do. Our parochial system
is not doing the magnificent work it is capable of, just
because at present there is not sufficient work done in
conjunction with it that can only be done by communities.
If one may dare to say so, our Lord's " method " and St.
John's complement one another. As our Lord's is the

i88 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

vital work and the Baptist's only incidental to it, so the
parochial system is undoubtedly the vital one — but it is
helped beyond measure by what Communities are really
only able to do. One sees continually in the work of one's
brethren at Mirfield parishes startled into new life.

As for the internal life of the Community, it is exactly
the kind necessary not only to make men efficient workers,
but pious persons. I can say all this with much more
freedom since I am not yet at all clear as to whether I am
called to the life.

My letter looks very cool and didactic, but you wished
me to say what I thought. It seems to me that the only
weak point is that conceivably men, myself among them,
might be attracted by the great privileges of the life, to a
state to which God may not have called them. Do write
again soon. H. B.

The year then passed in work such as we have de-
scribed, and Benson found, as July of 1901 approached,
that it was " better than retreat." " I am sure," he had
written on April 28 of that year, "that the way in which
vocations are usually found is by doing the next thing as
it comes to hand — and being content to go on doing it
without impatience."

I insert here part of two letters which accurately show
his attitude of mind towards life at Mirfield :

I agree entirely about Mirfield being a narrowing life . . .
but that is precisely why I am here. To do anything well,
one must deliberately sacrifice a large number of other
excellent pursuits and tastes. That is, surely, what you
have to do yourself. You sacrifice all that living in
England means, rightfully and deliberately, for a particular
purpose. Broadness is the very death of efficiency —
except to one or two geniuses who have so much energy
that they seem, at any rate, to be able to devote them-
selves to several things at once. There are simply scores
of people one could quote, who weighed the cost, and
then neglected one part of their nature, or rather pruned
it off, in order to have more time and leisure and energy
for that particular thing they meant to do well.

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 189

The Scriptures favour me too, I fancy (i Cor. ii. 2,
Phil. iii. 7).

(This is a pretty pass, when I fire texts at you across
the sea !)

Indeed all this is my solemn opinion. Celibacy, and
many other things, are right just for that very reason,
and not because marriage is "low" or ''carnal" or any
nonsense of that kind. . . .

It seems to me that the reason why we have such an
alarming number of mediocrities, and lack of giants, is
because of this accursed gospel of broadness, and " keeping
in touch with current thought." We are given a smatter-
ing of many subjects, and command of none, and zeal is
always derided as " narrow."

And again :

Lent has been too terrific for anything. Roughly, I
estimate I have preached about seventy sermons, and I
never wish, at present, to utter another word on the
subject of Religion. ... In about a fortnight I kick off
again : but not for long, thank goodness — because then I
have my holiday, and then a month of peace and quietness
here, during which time I hope to take the final step of
committing myself to this life at Mirfield. It is rather
terrifying to contemplate, and I am not absolutely deter-
mined yet ; but if nothing startling happens, by the end
of July I shall become a fixture.

. . . The loneliness must be vile [he was writing to
India]. I do indeed sympathise — because I am exactly the
same. To be quite alone even for a day is abominable
to me. But I always think there is a certain grim satis-
faction in shoving a thing alone, in a humdrum way.
We have a dog at home who runs with the carriage :
when he has sported himself about enough^ he goes under
the carriage into the dust, and pads along with his hind-
legs and tail showing over the back ; and I always sym-
pathise. He wishes, I think, to be part of a going
machine, and puts himself into touch with a larger thing
than himself, and he finds it worth the dust, because the
wheels are going all round him. I always feel just the
same here — after barking in various places one comes
back and fits into this machine ; and the very monotony
is a joy. When I feel down I always draw satisfaction

^.^^-

'"?j

..<

190 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

from the dog, because there is an extraordinary pleasure
in absolutely wearisome routine, and it has a kind of
hypnotic fascination that a turning wheel has.
Excuse this outburst of allegory.

Hence he schooled himself to write, on July 12, 1901,
to Mr. A. C. Benson :

I think Mamma told you a little time ago that I was
getting more settled here, and now I think I have quite
made up my mind to join the Community at the end of
this month. [Probably, he adds, he would have joined
last year but for his brother's words.] I feel now that
there is nothing else to be done. I am both more efficient
and more happy than ever in parish work, and am less
incompetent at this particular kind of work than any
other.

However, a bomb exploded brusquely. He wrote
again on July 23 to Mr. A. C. Benson :

July 23. ... I am sorry to say that everything is in the
wildest confusion, and for the present my profession is
postponed. I shall have to decide by Monday morning
whether I will offer myself for election or not. It arose
out of a lecture given to us by Canon Gore on " Higher
Criticism " that upset me terribly. I had not heard that
kind of thing before, and the Community cannot see its
way to giving me leave to be absent.

All this alludes to an episode which, as far as I can
see, he afterwards entirely forgot. At any rate, nowhere,
that I can find, has he mentioned it. Yet quite clearly
it was a pivotal point in his life — if not, indeed, an event
directive of all his mental development.

This episode occurred on the occasion of one of those
" Quiet Times " at which all available members of the
Community met together at Mirfield. They involved, with
other elements, a lecture, or perhaps two, upon some

MIRFIELD, 1898-1903 191

point considered of importance to the understanding of
the religious situation of the day.^

During that of July, 1901, Canon Gore gave two
or three lectures, which afterwards appeared in the
Pilot, upon the Synoptic Problem. He undoubtedly con-
sidered himself, while being fair to the opponents of the
Gospel record, as traditionally accepted, to be asserting a
theologically safe yet scientifically sure position. But, as
we have seen, Benson was thrown into a passion of dismay,
begged leave to attend no more such lectures in the future,
and withdrew, for four days (July 23-27) to consider his
position. About the facts there can be no doubt, though
they have left so slight an impression even upon contem-
porary correspondence.

The Bishop of Oxford has kindly written to me as
follows ;

CUDDESDON, WheATLEY, OxoN.,
T.^'Ca January 1915.

Dear Fr. Martindale,— [ . . . ] With regard to Ben-
son, I was very much attracted by him when he came to
Mirfield, but became speedily conscious that his mind and
mine moved in different planes. The most characteristic
thing which I remember was an occasion when I found,
to my great surprise, that he had never read the most
usual commentaries on books of the New Testament,
especially those by his father's friend, Dr. Lightfoot. I
urged him to read them on account of their surpassing
merit, but he came back after a time and told me that he
would do it if I told him, but that he wished seriously to
assure me that, if he were to consider such arguments

^ It was of one of these he wrote : " We are all at home just now — having a
' Quiet Time.' It is nice and restful, only we jaw too much in the evenings. . . .
Some of us are not made for debate — too moody. Possibly I am myself." As
a matter of fact, I am told that Hugh used to behave extraordinarily well, con-
sidering. He was often to be seen positively red in the face with the effort not
to say the thousand things he was bursting to say. The politically liberal, not
to say downright socialistic, colour which has at all times been observable at
Mirfield worried him not a little. He believed himself to observe this, as well
as theological liberalism, in the first superior, Canon Gore.

192 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

about the authenticity of books of the Bible — arguments
of the critical reason — and were to give his mind seriously
to them, he feared he would become a sceptic. This sort
of critical reasoning appeared to him to result wholly in
scepticism. With him it was " all or nothing." If he were
to hold on to religion, he must accept it simply on
authority because of his moral needs.

This he said quite seriously and solemnly. I do not
know what he may have thought later on in his life, but
I am certain that at the period when he came to Mirfield,
and all through the time he was there, this represented
his state of mind ; and I do not think anyone could give
a true account of what he was at that time and in his
later years amongst us without making this apparent.
Thus I hope you will publish this letter. The scene I have
described has remained in my mind extraordinarily dis-
tinctly ever since the time of our conversation, and I have
often pondered over it. I am sure that I have not ex-
aggerated. — Yours faithfully, C. OxON.

Benson himself wrote, though not upon this occasion,
to India :

"As regards the Epistle to Romans, I am particularly
ignorant of commentaries." He discovers, however, by
inquiry, Sanday and Headlam !

I can't get along with commentaries at all. It is a
forgotten element in my theological composition. What
I love is dogmatic and scientific theology, and " ascetic."
I have been reading a lot of this latter lately, " Mother
Julian of Norwich," "Molinos," &c. Mother Julian was
a delightful lady of 1400, who was an anchoress at Nor-
wich, and was "no scholar," but who had the most
beautiful and comforting visions. "Al shal bee well — al
shal bee well ; and thow shal see for thyself that al maner
of thynge shal bee well." And so on. Very deep too.^

^ By January, 1902, he has read this famous mystic, whom he loves despite
the perplexities of her last chapters, " two or three times." I should like to
emphasize already that theological and intellectual differences generally never
seemed to injure his personal relations or his sense of equity. Just as one of his
closest friends at Mirfield was socialist in tendency, so he is delighted when he
finds his friends like Canon Gore's books ; earnestly recommends his Prayer

MIRFIELD, 1 898-1903 193

The storm subsided, superficially, as rapidly as it rose.
Benson returned to Mirfield unable on his side to see any-
thing preventing his profession. At least the emotion that
drove from Liberalism had stilled the emotion that drew
to Rome. "Are you," Canon Gore inquired of him, "in
any danger of lapse ? " " No," said the candidate, aston-
ished at the question. He was elected on July 29th, and
professed on the ist of August, 1901. He writes in his
Confessions, with sincere emotion, of the happiness of that
day. Ecce nova f ado omnia. He obtained a new cassock.
His mother assisted at the initiation of a new life. From
the brethren he took the Pax, the kiss of peace ; at the
altar he received Communion. " In the afternoon I drove
out with my mother in a kind of ecstasy of contentment."

He flung himself into work once more. " It is hard/'
he writes, "for Catholics to believe it, but it is a fact that
as an Anglican I had far longer hours in the Confessional
than I have ever had in the Catholic Church. ... In one
London parish, for instance, for about four days at the
end of a mission, my brother-missioner and I interviewed
people, hearing confessions and recommending resolutions
and rules of life, for over eleven hours each day ; two more
hours were occupied in delivering sermons to vast con-
gregations. . . . We came from our quiet life red-hot with
zeal, and found everywhere men and women who seemed
to have been waiting for us in an extraordinary manner."

Besides these exterior activities, the Mirfield Theological
College was at this time preoccupying Hugh's mind a
little, and he wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury
about it.

and the Lords Prayer, and The Creed of the Christian ; but of his Body of
Christ I confess that he says he finds it " a terrible book, and really misleading
in language — a totally wrong impression Jof what he really? believes. All his
friends say so."

I N

194 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

The Archbishop, in his reply, dated August 28, 1902,

said :

Newton Don, Kelso, N.B.
2^th August 1902.

... I am keenly interested in what you tell me of the
new departure — for it is new, I suppose ? — in the work of
your Community.

And every thoughtful and capable plan for the wise
preparation and guidance of ordinands ought at present,
I think, to be welcomed by the whole Church. Whether
the actual doctrinal and practical teaching which ^ou
would give to such ordinands corresponds quite with what
I should myself give, is really a minor, though a most
important, matter. There is huge peril, as I think, in men
taking to the technical study of theology with a view to
ordination, without its being based upon adequate edu-
cation of a general sort, and I therefore rejoice to see that
you contemplate preparing all your men for a degree in
Arts before they become theologians.

In this letter the Archbishop not only added his voice
to that great chorus of experts in all branches who declare
that he succeeds best in his specialised department who
has not been defrauded of that wide base of general educa-
tion which the traditional forms of public school and
university teaching take as their ideal ; but he was with
infinite delicacy reminding Father Benson himself that his
theological studies, such as they were, reposed on no very
wide or solid foundations. Of his University training
enough has already been said. He did not love the
classics ; of science he will write :

. . . What a relief it is to come across anyone who
doesn't know about "science." Personally, I fear I am a
hopeless person to ask about it ; it always seems to me a
"red herring" in Christian apologetics; and that unless

one really knows about it, like Fr. , one had much

better keep to generalities, such as that science and re-
ligion have no more to do with one another than, e.g.,
geography and music ! They are both branches of truth,

MIRFIELD, 1 898-1903 195

and therefore both come from God ; but beyond that, &c.
. . . But I am hopelessly prejudiced ! And you had
much better ask Fr. what he thinks.^

Of general history he never was, I think, a close student,
though it must be confessed he learnt his way about the
documents relating to such periods as he did study with
great success. In speaking of his historical novels, I shall
find it easy to emphasize the minute care in research
and quite scholarly effort after accuracy he displayed.
And with regard to general topics of modern interest,
we have his brother's testimony that he was something of
a Gallio.

" I do not think," he writes, " that Hugh had ever any
real interest in social reform, in politics, in causes, in the
institutions which aim at the consolidation of human
endeavour and sympathy." ^

Perhaps this statement will need some slight, not
qualification, but adjustment, to the perspective of Hugh's
ideals and motives before it will convey a perfectly true
impression. Still, as a fact, it is undoubtedly true. Later,
it will be easy to follow the main lines of Hugh's philan-
thropic and social interests ; at present, references to
contemporary topics of political and social importance are
startling by their absence. None but a few references to
the Education crisis of 1902 diversify his very full corre-
spondence with his friend in India. I quote one which is
perhaps characteristic :

November 15.

There is a frightful storm raging about the Education
Bill. I have almost given up trying to understand it.

^ spiritual Letters, '^. 14. His explicit declaration on this subject we shall
find in his novel, None other Gods, where he incarnated the spirit of science, in
the usual sense of that word, in Dr. Whitty, a personage for whom he had an
esteem bordering on veneration. * Hugh, p. 123.

196 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

The only principle I am quite confident of is that every
system of education (religious) which is not strictly de-
nominational is rotten. I would far sooner Jewish children
were taught Jewish religion than a washed-out Christianity.
Christianity has simply not been given a chance in our
schools. You might as well have a board to discuss the
ingredients of medicine, and strike out all " poisons " {e.g.
strychnine, &c.), as have a board of vague managers to
discuss religious teaching. There is something connected
with the original, I will admit, left in both cases, but it
is neither medicine nor Christianity.

It will, then, be idle to seek for any of Benson's pre-
occupations at this time outside the theological interests
which were always his. It might perhaps have been
expected that an illation could be made from the class of
studies imposed by the Mirfield Fathers upon the students
of their Theological College to those which they demanded
of themselves. But to begin with, the College syllabus,
though now of a very comprehensive and efficient sort,^
was, in Hugh Benson's time, still fairly fluid. Moreover,
the family spirit reigning in the Community brought it
to pass that, although in almost every department the
house might include a man of real distinction and
originality, yet such very wide liberty was deliberately
accorded to each as regards occupation and details of
study, that it would be impossible to estimate, from the
mere fact of his having been there, what a man might
have achieved. Besides, men arrived at Mirfield at very
different stages of their mental formation ; some in middle
age, when the mind does not take kindly to novelties of
thought, least of all of abstract thought, and when the

^ After the taking of their degree at Leeds University, where they reside in
a Hostel, the students spend two more years in theological study at Mirfield.
After Ordination and some experience of pastoral work, they are invited to
return for a visit of a week or more, during which they study moral theology and
casuistry.

MIRFIELD, 1 898-1903 197

memory refuses, in most cases, to charge itself with any
new burden of facts.

Anyhow, what differentiates Mirfield most completely
from a Catholic seminary naturally is, that theology can
there be taught historically or at most philosophically, or
in both these ways, but not dogmatically. There might
be theses, but to these no " note " could be attached ;
the professors could not propound, as Catholic professors
must, " This thesis is of faith, or probable, or theologically
certain." Interesting, pious, and encouraging the theo-
logical explanations Benson heard might be, but scarcely
satisfying to his soul, which craved authority. In con-
sequence, apart from his moral notes, the synopsis of
Lehmkuhl, referred to above, among his many note-books
of that period I find one only which can be called theo-
logical, and it contains, by the quaintest chance, a very
bored digest of Pusey's commentary on the Minor Prophets
and the Abb6 Turmel's historical account of the dogma
of original sin. Thus did the high orthodox Anglican
elbow the French Modernist ; and on neither does Father
Benson feel himself drawn to express any sentiment as
to worth of method or conclusion. One book, however,
of an exceptional kind exists. It is a minute and purely
mystical interpretation of Genesis and Exodus taken almost
verse by verse.^ This was written in 1901.

^ I quote a few lines from the meditations suggested by Exodus xiv.
1-4. The final blow against sin, by placing souls beyond its tyranny.
7. 600 chariots : the mark of " assault " (666 number of Beast).
14. Thus the Apostles were terrified until the power had finally come,
and they were separated from sin by Pentecost.
16. The Blessing of the Water.

19. The Cloud is the Spirit ; both together save Israel.
Water and the Spirit constitute Baptism.

20. Yet the world fails to understand : The Spirit is dark on the world's side.
A perpetual allegory.

There is a little more in another hook about the Apocalypse, but very little
else.

198 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Such then is the account, as complete in all save one
department as I can make it, of Benson's life at Mirfield.
In that department is, of course, to be found all that
relates directly to his Homeward movement. At Mirfield
he was religiously happy : his apostolic work was active
to the point of feverishness ; his literary power was
developing enormously ; all his future characteristics were
plainly visible. His life might have seemed to him ideal,
had it not been for the discordant voice reiterating in his
ears a call of which he could not judge the nature. Hence,
a certain hardness, irascibility, noisiness (if I dare so de-
scribe it), still discernible in him, is to be put down not
alone to the relative superficiality of youth's emotions
and inexperienced outlook, but to the uneasiness of one
who is not wholly in his proper milieuy and half knows
it, and wholly tries to persuade himself that this is untrue.
Artificiality enters such a life ; the man is not altogether
"himself." It will be our duty to study, now, his diffi-
cult transit from one atmosphere, or rather world, into
another ; the machinery of his life will groan and jar
more harshly still, before all his soul runs smooth.

CHAPTER VIII
CONVERSION

All this part of my way was full of what they call Duty, and I was sustained
only by my knowledge that the vast mountains (which had disappeared) would
be part of my life very soon if I still went on steadily towards Rome.

H. Belloc, The Path to Rome.

I

When, during his life at Mirfield, did the call to Rome
make itself heard once more ?

The first that I can find is early in 1902, when Father
Frere wrote to him from Florence a letter which I
summarise :

I am very sorry to hear of all your trouble of mind
about our differences. . . . The issue is now narrowed. . . .
The papal infallibility is now the real point at issue and
with (the Pope's) action comes the denial by the Roman
Catholics of our position. The historical argument is
" extraordinarily difficult " if by it alone we hope to arrive
at a conclusion. But the plain man can decide about the
immediate fact on the evidence of his own experience
which is "God's book for each man." Ask, "Am I no
priest ? Are my communions frauds ? " " So many of
our sort get an idealised Rome into our heads or a sort of
fantastic view — I am afraid I shall have to go — or in some
way or another get beset with an insane sort of judgment
on the point (on) which we suspect or know ourselves not
to be sane and which therefore we know we cannot trust,
and so hover and hover and swing this way and that . . .
a horrid agony of nightmare."

For a brief space this letter laid the ghost. The

appeal to the evident experience of the plain man was,

199

200 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

to Benson's temperament, irresistible. For a long time —
to the very eve, in fact, of his reconciliation — he will
believe himself a priest ; and the inference that where
the sacraments are, and where grace is given with them,
there is the Church, seems at first sight irresistible.

In the June, then, of 1902 he told his mother, as they
paused upon a little bridge over a brook near Tremans,
that he had been disturbed in his mind by the vision of
Rome, but that his mind was once more at rest. Newman,
however, after the terrible challenge of Augustine's claim
against the Donatists,^ solemnly cried aloud that he who
has once seen a ghost can never be as though he had never
seen it; and so for Hugh Benson too the vision once
more dawned on his horizon after being only a month
or two eclipsed. He had promised that nothing should
be thought or done by him without his telling his mother,
and "sometime between that and Christmas I had to
redeem my promise." By the fulfilment of this promise,
and the careful acquainting of Mrs. Benson and of
Father Frere of each step in his progress, he rendered
himself invulnerable, on his conversion, to one whole
flight of darts, shot by those for whom deceit and
Catholicism are associated notions, and who cannot
imagine a conversion honestly carried through. Loyally
did the recipients of his confidences disabuse his accusers
in this matter.

I must therefore try to summarise as clearly as pos-
sible the theory, or rather the two theories, by which
during his Mirfield period he justified his position as a
minister in the Church of England. And here, as always,
when dealing with what is the combined product of
direct experience, of introspection, of reminiscence, and

* Securus iudicat orbis terrarum.

CONVERSION 20I

of the schematising intellect, I will not forget that at any
given moment of this period Benson might not have re-
cognised as his what is here assigned to him. It can be
checked in two ways — first, by his Confessions, on which,
of course, I draw largely, and second, by his letters of
this period. And yet everybody knows how, during a
space of years, the intellect has been subconsciously at
work upon its material, eliminating, rearranging, focus-
ing. Who would have supposed that the tempest-tossed
Augustine — as we see him portrayed long after, when he
relates his conversion in his own Confessions — was the man
who in reality had been writing philosophic treatises, and
commenting on Vergil for hours together, and entertain-
ing his mother and a group of cultured friends, in the
villa at Cassiciacum ? that the passionate convert, as
alone most readers know him, was too the tranquil
theorist, who decided to embrace Christianity, determined
all the while that he would have to find nothing wrong
with Neoplatonism ? You must infuse a considerable
element of calculation, it may be, into Augustine's Con-
fessions, to obtain a truthful picture ; and of passion, not
to say whim, into Father Benson's Confessions, to obtain
a portrait of the Mirfield Hugh. So too, although we can
watch him in the letters spoken of above, which have
already shown him as a man of moods, these may, on
their side, do so too exclusively, for letters are things of
the moment, and need, they too, correction. But there
are some contemporary and deliberately drawn up docu-
ments which shall guide us.

For a considerable time then, he considers, he had
held to the position that the Anglican Church was an
accurate, or fairly accurate, restoration of the teaching in
vogue at a " Primitive " period, considered, on the whole, to

202 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

have existed down to the end of the fifth or sixth century,
or perhaps up to the Fourth General Council inclusive.
Then corruption had set in : Rome and Constantinople
had piled up their excesses ; the Nonconformists, by
defect, had dropped out altogether. The theory is a
familiar one, and very simple at first sight. It demanded,
however, that one should admit the "failure of Christ's
promises " for a thousand years ; it assumed, too, that
the reconstruction of primitive doctrine was an affair of
historical research, to be demanded, presumably, from
experts. Archaeology had at no time much fascination
for Hugh. He demanded a living voice in a modern
world. Clear that the Prayer Book was no more of a
living voice than the Bible, he turned to "the only
elements in the Church of England which bear any
resemblance at all to a living voice — the decisions of
Convocation, the resolutions of Pan-Anglican Conferences,
and the utterances of Bishops" — with the result that he
found them contradictory, or dumb, or, as he naively
owns, they answered "in a manner which I could not
reconcile with what I was convinced was the Christian
Faith." He never, that is, expected to find in them a
voice endowed with even that minimum of authority
which should govern at least his exterior consent and public
teaching. Modify it indeed he did, but according to what
the clergy of the churches he visited might expect. The
shape, colour, and adornment of their stoles proved, he
says, a fairly accurate barometer of doctrine ; it was
more confusing when vestments were worn indeed, but
only at services to which ''important Protestants did not
come." To veil your language, to utter discourses fully
intelligible to a select few, might amuse a naughty boy,
still at the age of plots and codes and ciphers, but was

CONVERSION 203

intolerable to a grown man of passionate sincerity. But
merely to preach a few great truths, such as the Father-
hood of God, or the all-importance of the Person of
Christ, trusting that these would " find their normal out-
come in doctrines which Christ, the Father's Utterance,
meant to be taught, but His official representatives dared
not teach," was torture to one whose whole Christian posi-
tion, collegiate and personal, implied that Christ spoke
through a Church, and the Church through her priest.

By instinct Benson hated Gnosticism, and the cult
of the 61ite, and the disciplina arcani. There was a sphere
in which he gave rein to his schoolboy love for plot and
counterplot, but it was that of personal or domestic
politics, not of essential religion. And he could not but
feel nervous when he found that on almost every point
which he considered thus essential, he had to act un-
supported by, if not in defiance of, the officials of his
Church.

At this point, therefore, he found himself obliged to
alter his basal theory. He no longer proclaimed the
Church of England the purest of the three great Churches
on which alone his view was focused ; and he abandoned
any attempt to find a definite voice, or organ for a voice,
in that Church. He regarded the Church, now, as equally
composed of Roman, Eastern, and Anglican, and their
" silent consent " was their authoritative voice. Where
they did not deny, they taught. The whole difficulty
now appeared to be to keep Canterbury quiet enough ;
if she spoke, she might speak heresy. Moscow nobody
listened to ; Rome spoke, presumably the truth ; England
as a whole muttered a good deal, but inaudibly for the
most part, and anyhow so obscurely that you might say
she did not explicitly disavow her sisters. The Thirty-nine

204 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Articles were ** explained away in the manner familiar to
Anglican controversialists." ^ Father Benson therefore
declares himself to have believed in the Church Diffusive ;
from such communities as had retained the Apostolic
ministry and the Creeds, a kind of general consent exhaled
itself, though how this inarticulate conviction was to be
stated in dogmatic forms remained a puzzle ; doctors
would most certainly disagree ; to whom should the un-
lettered layman, not skilled in diagnosing the constituent
elements of belief, while held as it were in solution and un-
precipitated, appeal ? " Well, . . ." argued Father Benson,
" to a clergyman who acknowledges, with me, the Church
Diffusive in my sense." Having thus packed one's jury,
and being oneself the judge, there should be no great
difficulty about a satisfactory verdict.

But, as I said, no honest man could, in this frame of
mind, feel secure. It was at this time that his second
attack of anxious surmise supervened.

He therefore made one new clear statement of the
Diffusive Theory, and sent it to the Rev. G. Tyrrell, S.J.,
under cover of the following letter. I quote the letter
in full : the statement will be seen in the Appendix,
Vol. II., p. 451.

Private and Confidential.

House of the Resurrection,

MiRFIELD.

Rev. and dear Sir, — You will pardon a complete
stranger troubling you ? I have had the pleasure of
reading most of your books, and feel that, if you will
allow me, I can more easily consult you about the position
I am in, than anyone in the Roman Catholic Communion.

For about five years I have had, from time to time,
strong drawings towards " Rome." In attempting to test
the nature of these drawings, I have practically always found

' Confessions, p. 74.

CONVERSION 205

that my motives were so mixed and second-rate, that I could
not in any way clearly distinguish the motions of the Holy
Ghost ; and it appeared to me my duty to regard them as
assaults upon faith. Again and again I came to the con-
clusion, after thought and prayer, that God had placed me
in an extremely difficult position in the field of His Church,
and that it would be a terrible breach of trust to leave it.

Since Lent, however, these drawings have appeared
more strongly than ever. Very frequently, however, I
still detect among them second-rate motives of personal
tendencies and "policy," as well as definitely evil motives
of a love of ease, and subtle forms of pride, poisoning
all the springs of thought. Again and again some humilia-
tion has turned my thoughts to the Roman Communion
as a way of escape. But I feel that, in spite of these evil
and inadequate motives, something more is behind ; and
I cannot tell whether the voice is the voice of God or not.

There are, too, to my mind, several very real and
weighty obstacles in the way of my submission to " Rome "
(if, mdeed, they are not Divine warnings) ; and it is about
those obstacles that I chiefly wish to make inquiries.

In the meantime, I am learning, I think, more than
ever that faith is a gift, and not a climax of intellectual
processes ; and it is this gift that I lack. If Rome alone
is the Catholic Church, I lack it ; or if the Church of
England is part of the Catholic Church, I tend to lack it.
At present the phrase " I believe in the Catholic Church "
means little more to me than that I believe there is such
a thing.

But whether these drawings are of faith or temptation,
I am unable to follow them until I am in good faith as
regards intellectual difficulties. Of course I am quite
willing to leave many obscure things unsolved ; but it
cannot be right to act clean contrary to what does not
seem obscure at all, but perfectly clear. Some of the
questions on the paper that I enclose seem to me perfectly
clearly against "Rome." And it is only this deepening
touch on my soul (whether of God or the Evil One I am
not sufficiently spiritual to distinguish), which makes me
even discuss these questions with myself, and ask whether
I am right or wrong in my intellectual conceptions.

The enclosed papers contain the chief of my difficulties,
and I should be most deeply grateful if the papers might
be returned to me annotated with comments, or with

2o6 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

references to books that I should read. I am willing too,
of course (and should be grateful), to see yourself or
anyone that you recommend, if that is right, and to
observe any course of devotion or reading that is advisable
so far as these things are within my power. But I am
naturally tied to a certain extent by the conditions of my
life here.

But I am above all anxious to avoid anything approach-
ing a controversial tone. If a certain tone (which for
want of another term one must call controversial) is at all
prominent in the books one is recommended to read, one's
heart so quickly turns to self-defence, and becomes hard
and closed to truth. In more than one " Roman " book
I have read lately I have been rendered incapable of
appreciating fully the force of arguments, because it seemed
as if the writers desired to bully me ; and as they were
unable to judge dispassionately, they have attributed false
motives, and misrepresented facts in connection with the
Church of England. And it is partly for this reason that I
am presuming to write to you, since I feel sure that you
know that sincerity is not wanting to our clergy, and that
the ''Catholic Movement" in the Church of England is
not mainly supported by blasphemous fools who like
playing at being priests, and that at least some of our
leaders possess common honesty and sense.

My questions I have tried to expound in the simplest
possible form, as I wish to avoid even the appearance of
argumentation. It is not my wish to attempt to prove
anybody wrong, but only to be convinced of the truth
whatever that may be ; so I have thrown all my defences
open, so far as I have been able.

On the top of all this egotism may I add a little more ?
as I do wish as far as possible to put before you all the facts
— others besides those on which I desire to consult you.

I. So far as my knowledge of myself extends, I believe
that I am sincere, and that there is no selfish desire in me
strong enough either to hold me where I am, or to send
me to " Rome." Of course it is only too possible that I may
be in a state of dreadful self-deception ; but at least I am
under the impression that I will submit to the Catholic
Church — in fact, that I am already in a state of submission,
so far as the gift of faith is granted me. Much of my
darkness, however, if not all, may well be the result of
sins against faith.

CONVERSION 207

2. At present I am full of preaching engagements up
to and beyond Easter, and at present I intend to fulfil
them. If, however, these difficulties of mine appear ade-
quately solved, and the interior drawing continues, I
should contemplate cancelling my engagements, and living
a retired life for some months before taking any further
step — unless, that is, the call became insistent and irre-
sistible, but at present I should be inclined to distrust
such a call.

3. The question of Holy Orders does not much trouble
me. I am sufficiently satisfied of my priesthood to have
no scruple in ministering at the altar and to penitents.
I am also sufficiently satisfied of the imperativeness of the
voice of the " Catholic Church " to believe what I am told
— at least, I hope so.

4. I fear I must ask you to regard my letters as altogether
confidential. To say no more, my debt of gratitude to the
Community of the Resurrection, of which I am a member,
makes me eager to avoid anything that would unnecessarily
injure its influence. But I should be extremely grateful if
you would allow me to show anything that you might write
to me, to my superior, with whom I am on terms of com-
plete confidence on this matter, and to one or two other
discreet friends. Those I have consulted so far have not
helped me very much, except by the reassurance of their
personal character and learning, and by the fact of their
contentment with the position of the Church of England.

5. As regards my special reading on this subject, I
have read several of the ordinary controversial text-books
on either side : Dr. Rivington's, Mr. Richardson's, and one
by a member of the Society of lesus, on the Apostolic
Office, and such answers to them as exist ; and the result is
pure bewilderment. All that I can deduce is that a devout
and learned man can, sincerely, find in history exactly
what he expects, and that every theory of Church order
can equally be shown to be possible, or disproved, by the
statements and significant silences of history ; and that
all that one can say is that some theories seem less out
of the question than others. On the whole, however,
the book that impressed me most deeply is Newman's
Development of Doctrine — although every now and then I
am suddenly seized with a distrust of his mind and
methods.

What I think would be of most value to my state and

2o8 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

constitution of mind (though I dare say I am completely
wrong) is a catena of Fathers, which I could verify, on the
See of Peter as the necessary centre of unity, and the
Petrine texts, as well as a reference to some book dealing
with the schism of East and West dispassionately — giving,
I mean, a record of facts with as little comment as possible.
I have, of course, also consulted other writers on particular
points.

6. The Reformation period seems to me the strongest
argument for " Rome " in one sense. One has little doubt,
given fortitude, on which side one would have been. So
I need no pressure on that point. Yet, I find myself, by
the Providence of God, in the English Communion, which,
after all, has shown a marvellous sacramental vitality, and
I feel bound to give great weight to that fact, so long as it
is possible to remain in good faith.

Especially, dear sir, I ask the charity of your prayers.
If, too, you could say a Mass for me, I should be deeply
grateful. Some curious coincidences have taken place in
my life in connection with devotion to the Holy Ghost and
this subject, and if there were any devotions of the kind
in which my needs could find a place, I feel sure that it
would greatly help me.

I feel, indeed, how much I am asking of you, and how
great my debt of gratitude will be if you should help me,
in any direction, towards a solution of these difficulties.

If any expressions in my letter, or in the enclosure,
seem to you presumptuous or offensive in any way, may I
ask your pardon beforehand ?

Believe me, dear and rev. sir, yours faithfully in Christ,

Hugh Benson.

The Rev. Fr. Tyrrell.

Disastrously enough, one page only, numbered 8, of
Father Tyrrell's answer survives. It contains a very clear
and theological note on the first suggestion in section iv.
of the statement, and the beginning of a note on section v.
In his letter the priest distinguished carefully between the
dogma of the Church — the wording of the Vatican formula
he considered " minimising "—and the practical policy and
tone, so to speak, of the Church, which he called maxi-

CONVERSION 209

mising. He being a minimiser, could remain where he
was, but felt a certain reluctance (which was not indeed
logical, but had in it a certain delicacy of feeling with
regard to the appropriate, and a tenderness of apprehension
lest a convert, admitted on Tyrrell's lines, should find
himself disillusioned and dipaysi in so alien an atmosphere)
for " receiving " an inquirer. He ended by begging Benson
to remember him in his mass, a request full of Tyrrell's
irony, in any circumstances, and doubly so in these. At
this time Tyrrell was not known, even among his associ-
ates, for the openly modernistic attitude he afterwards
assumed, and had scarcely published even pseudonymously
the books which afterwards made him so well known.
Benson's eye was quite unlikely to detect the theological
flaws or dangerous tendencies which expert scholastics
already observed in his books, and was, like so many others,
utterly captivated by the indescribable charm of Tyrrell's
style, the lucidity of his expositions, and the warmth of his
charity still so noticeable.

"Father Tyrrell," he exclaims, "always seems to me
to say the last possible word ! " ^

Disconcerted by Tyrrell's rebuff, he accepted for a
moment the interpretation placed upon it by those whose
judgment he valued, and decided he was meant to stay where
he was. Almost immediately the pendulum swung back,
and he implored leave to cancel his winter engagements.
Superiors prescribed the drug of work, and kept him to it.

He put himself in touch, however, with the Rev.
Spencer Jones, in whom, if in anyone, he felt, he could
find help in his difficulties.

The Rev. Spencer J. Jones, rector of Moreton-in-the-
Marsh, was invited in November, 1899, by the Association

^ spiritual Letters^ p. 16,
I O

2IO ROBERT HUGH BENSON

for Promoting the Unity of Christendom (the A.P.U.C.) to
preach one of a series of sermons, bearing upon reunion,
on the Saints' days of 1900. The feast of St. Peter was
ceded to Mr. Spencer Jones, at his request, owing to his
attention having recently been focused on the Petrine
aspect of Church unity by a book published in 1895 {The
Gift of the Keys) by Canon Everest of Truro, an Anglican.
From November, 1899, to June, 1900, Mr. Spencer Jones
prepared his address, which was in fact delivered to a
select audience of men profoundly interested in the ideals
of the A.P.U.C. The address, which was prefaced by a
Bidding Prayer, lasted an hour and a half ; and, having
been invited afterwards to publish it, Mr. Spencer Jones
found that it grew beneath his hands to the dimensions of
a book, which appeared on January 13, 1902, under the
title, England and the Holy See, an Essay towards the Reunion
of Christendom. To this Lord Halifax contributed an
Introduction. A first edition ran out in eight months ; and
later in the same year (1902) a cheaper and much abridged
edition appeared and proved so permanently popular
that it has been issued in a cheap shilling form as late as
the end of 1914.

It is by the courtesy of Mr. Spencer Jones himself that
I am able to give what I can safely assert to be an equit-
able account of his thesis.

It is assumed that reunion among Christians is a
consummation to be hoped and worked for. The ideal
has been pursued, however, with too much sentiment,
too little of the scientific spirit. Science observes ; makes
experiments ; travels towards hypothesis, adopting a " work-
ing hypothesis " directly it can ; and thence, to theory.
Thus, in politics, a Bill precedes an Act. But as a Bill
will be discussed as though it were already on the

CONVERSION 211

statute book, so hypotheses must be discussed as though
they were already ascertained facts.

Let us assume as hypothesis, Rome is Right. All dis-
cussions hitherto have assumed anything and everything ex-
cept this. Yet, as the route by which Ladysmith was actually
relieved was the one route pronounced by experts on the
spot to be impossible, so the rightness of Rome may prove
to be the one hypothesis always needed and never made.

Now : if none of the Christian bodies consent to
change, reunion clearly, even approximation, is impossible.
Each body then must consent to change " after its kind,"
when and as it can. Now consider Rome, unique among
Christian bodies for its commanding position, its numbers,
and its claim to infallibility. Rome can change in dis-
cipline, not in dogma. Hence, towards reunion, she can,
by the law of her organism, contribute modifications in the
former, "explanations" of the latter: that is all. To ask
more, is to ask her for suicide. She could not even
begin to change herself structurally, i.e. dogmatically,
because, the essential law of her existence being Infalli-
bility, to annul that would mean to take her own life. But
no other community, however wrong, need be doomed if it
changes ; they all can alter their fundamental laws, because
they do not profess, they explicitly deprecate, their own
infallibility ; and, in history, they have so changed.

England's relation with Rome is unique. England is
of all nations, Duchesne has said, that one whose ecclesi-
astical origins are linked most evidently with the Apostolic
See. Henry's " act of supremacy " was an act of violence
and fraud which wrenched England away from the
Rome of his day despite herself : modern Englishmen
cannot be assumed even to understand the Roman
position they controvert.

212 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Since Anglicans admit Roman Orders, but Rome does
not admit Anglican, it is but reasonable for the former
to accept the ordination rite of the latter, but unreasonable
to expect Rome to accept that of England.

That corporate reunion is possible, is proved (we now
see), on a small scale, by the Franciscans of New York,
and, on a larger, by various Eastern Communities.

Mr. Spencer Jones, having formulated this theory,
proceeded to argue that it should not prove impossible
for Anglicans to see their way to reducing it to practice,
and to join in establishing, no mere friendly confederation
of Churches organically separated, but a single body,
professing one faith, using identical sacraments, in sub-
ordination, not only de facto accepted but de iure imposed,
to the Apostolic See. Indeed, the Pope, it could be
already held by them, is the Head of the Church not
merely de iure ecclesiastico, but de iure divinoy and is to
have been so appointed by Christ not alone politically,
for government, but spiritually, for teaching. Hence
even infallibility may be predicated of him, inasmuch
Christ promised inerrancy to His Church as a whole,
and she may express her universal faith not only through
the general belief and practice of her children, or the
collective voice of her bishops in council, but through her
Supreme Pastor regarded not as a separate oracle but as the
mouthpiece of the whole.^ Union with Rome was neces-
sary not alone for the bene esse of a Church, but normally
and in the long run for its esse. A dislocated limb is not eo
ipso dead, though, if it be not swiftly restored to its proper
play within its socket, it will soon need amputation, and
meanwhile it suffers and is relatively useless.

^ Contemporary Catholic appreciation of Mr. Spencer Jones's book, and the
theological elucidation of this point in particular, may be judged by three
leading articles in the Tablet, March 15 and 22, and April 5, 1902.

CONVERSION 213

Reunion, therefore, must be zealously sought for ; but,
for those who believed the Anglican Church to be thus
sick and dislocated, corporate reunion might be ambitioned.
He only who believed himself to be, because within the
Anglican Church, therefore outside the body of the
Catholic Church, need feel individual submission to be
imperative. Were it asked of men who professed their
conviction that the Pope's voice was infallible in faith
and morals, why they did not submit to the unvarying
utterance of Rome — that the Anglican Church was no
Church, and that it was the duty of each Anglican to
" come in," the answer was the old appeal from the Pope
ill-informed to the Pope better-informed : the Italian Curia
as probably misunderstood the Anglican position as
average Englishmen quite certainly were ignorant of the
real doctrine and guarantees of Roman Catholicism. But
a disciplinary decree based on a misunderstanding could
be disregarded ; while if the Anglican Church were a
part of the Catholic Church, the Pope's voice, uttering
what she disbelieved in, was speaking not according to
the faith of the Church as a whole, and was therefore
not infallible.^

Benson, as a direct consequence of his study of

Mr. Spencer Jones's book, wrote to him in May, 1902, as

follows :

House of the Resurrection, Mirfield,
May, 1902,

Dear Brother, — Will you pardon a complete stranger
writing to you on the subject of your most interesting
book England and the Holy See ? I borrowed a copy the

^ Of quite modern defenders of this position the Rev. Ronald Knox, the son
of the Bishop of Manchester, is, I imagine, the best known and certainly the
most brilliant ; he, in his Reunion all Round, reduces the venerable idea of
reunion by any means other than Rome to so relentless an absurdum, that he
makes his readers fear for the validity of his own case.

2t4 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

other day which I must return immediately ; and we have
not yet a copy of our own here, so that I am not sure
that I will be able to look up any references in it to which
you might direct my attention, should you care to answer
my letter.

But I write to ask a question which possibly you may
not wish to answer, but I am encouraged from your book
to hope that you will ; but if you do not care to answer it
I shall perfectly understand that it is a subject you might
not wish to discuss with a stranger. But before I ask it,
may I say how deeply interested I am in the book, and
how completely, so far as I have had time and possess
capacity to study it, my own opinions accord with those
put forward in it ?

You seem, apart from details, to establish — (i) that the
Primacy of Peter is of Divine origin ; (2) that there is no
demand made by the See of Peter, to be held defide as a
term of communion, which is impossible to concede.

Therefore, does it not seem a duty to submit to that
See ? For Rome herself states, normally, that it is neces-
sary to salvation : and, granted (i), I do not see what
obstacle can justify anyone, priest or layman, in refusing
to obey the call of him whom our Blessed Lord appointed
to rule His Church. For if (i) is true, surely there can
be no jurisdiction apart from that divinely appointed
Head.

There are, of course, many reasons for hesitation : the
fact of having implicitly to deny the validity of one's own
sacramental acts, if that is to say, one is to serve as a
priest in the Roman Church ; the fact of finding oneself
placed providentially in this part of Christendom ; the
fear of being blinded by the extreme discomforts of the
Anglican position — are all sufficient to make one hesitate
a considerable time before taking such a serious step.

But I wish to get the ground clear, so far as may be,
before anything else ; and your own book stating, as it does,
so many of my own convictions, and emanating, as it
does, from one who is still content to minister in the
Church of England, has encouraged me to ask whether
you can give me further data or references in the direction
I have indicated.

May I add further that I am aware that many, with
great reason, believe that the Church of England has a
work to do in the world of a peculiar delicacy. But this

CONVERSION 215

scarcely justifies one who believes in the Primacy of Peter
from remaining in her if she is schismatic — quite apart
from the fact that she permits heresies to be openly con-
fessed and taught by her accredited teachers. I have read
the common and more recent books of controversy on
both sides ; but there seems to me to be too much dust of
battle and of partisan feeling in them to be of much use in
clearing one's own vision.

I am afraid this letter is most inadequate — yet I hope
it will be sufficiently clear in putting before you my
particular difficulty.

I shall be grateful if you will be kind enough to regard
this letter as strictly confidential. If you wish your letter
to be regarded in the same way would you kindly mark it
so ? But if you can see your way to it, I should be grateful
if you will allow me to discuss your answer with one or
two friends, and especially with the Superior of the
Community, Fr. Frere.

Believe me, yours faithfully in O.B.L.,

Hugh Benson.

P.S. — I would like to add one word more.

The commonly held Anglican theory of Church govern-
ment, in its best form, appears to be that all bishops are
essentially equal, not only in the sacerdotium, but as re-
gards government ; and that the Primacy of Rome, like a
Patriarchate or like the Primacy of Canterbury, may be for
the dene esse, but not esse of the Church — not, that is to
say, of Divine origin. And next, that there are certain
demands made by Rome, that may be true in themselves,
but uncatholic in that they are unjustifiable terms of com-
munion ; and that therefore for the sake of the liberty of
truth Anglicans may at any rate resist what would other-
wise be for the peace of the Church. This, if it is held,
appears a reasonable ground for remaining in the Anglican
Communion — but, as I understand your book, you tend,
at least, to demolish this theory.

As regards infallibility ; that does not seem a difficulty.
Granted the Divine origin of the Primacy of Peter, that
Primacy is an essential mark of the Church ; and if one
holds — as I myself certainly do — the infallibility of the
'' Church," that infallibility must certainly reside in the
communion of Peter. But I have been accustomed to
believe and teach that the infallible authority resided in

2i6 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

the consent of Christendom — whether conciliar or diffusive.
This of course stands or falls, as a possible theory, with
the Anglican conception that I have tried to state above.

Please understand how fully aware I am of the in-
adequacy of this letter. But I have deliberately omitted all
that appears to be of the nature of side-issues ; on the
understanding that in the main I believe that I hold very
much what your book would lead me to think that you
yourself hold. H. B.

Mr. Spencer Jones answered, never having met Father
Benson, but knowing him by reputation only, in a letter
which was either lent and not returned, or, I surmise, in
consequence of some explicit request, destroyed, for at
this period and later Benson kept letters quite regardless
of the triviality or the reverse of their contents. He
emphasized, however, his desire that Father Benson
should keep his Superior continuously informed of the
correspondence thus initiated. On May 23 Benson
answered by a short note, expressing his fear lest he
might be yielding to the temptation to desert a " difficult
and it may be all but untenable position in the battle,
and yet a vital one, for one of comparative ease and
security." To disentangle motives was deplorably difficult.
Hence the value of Mr. Spencer Jones's book, which
diverted attention from self to objective facts. Yet
self-knowledge was necessary to avoid a biased inter-
pretation of those very facts. . . . How imperative, then,
to hesitate I

On May 27, he followed this up with a letter in which,
after deploring the fact that men who deny dogmas
explicitly stated in the Creeds — such as the Virgin Birth —
are tolerated in the Church of England, he continues :

What you say about Round Table conferences is most
interesting and most inspiring, and I hope really that the
idea will not be allowed to drop altogether. The very fact

CONVERSION 217

of holding such a conference, apart from any intrinsic
good that might result, would awaken people to the fact of
the disunion of Catholic Christendom. The saddest fact
about the whole question is that the majority of English-
men take it for granted (i) that the Church of England
approximates towards Protestantism, and that reunion with
them and the recognition of Protestant principles are
natural and obvious things to be desired ; (2) that the
Church of England is separated by an impassable gulf
from i Catholic Christendom, and that reunion in that
direction is impossible, and the desire for it disloyal.

And a little later he says ;

The book that you speak of, to come out in two years'
time, is just what is needed. The modern controversial
books seem to me hopelessly inadequate. They are too
obviously and confessedly written for a purpose ; and
many of them, no doubt in good faith, omit things that
seem to oneself vital, but which seem to the writers as
beside the point : e.g. the strongest argument, to my
mind, against Rome, consists in the remarkable omissions
in the Fathers, &c. St. Vincent and St. Chrysostom both
give an account of steps to be taken to ascertain what is
the Faith, which, as it appears to me, could not by any
stretch oif imagination have been written by a modern
Roman doctor — not from what they do say but from what
they don't say. Now that is the kind of argument one
wants thoroughly dealing with ; especially by parallel
passages in more modern divines, showing, e.g.^ that the
Primacy of Rome and the necessity of communion with
her was so obviously taken for granted that these saints
did not mention it. One wants to have the broad historical
situation before one and not minute wrestlings over detail,
and sometimes little schoolboy slaps at opponents. A
large book consisting chiefly of extracts, with few or no
comments, except purely historical, would, it seems to me,
meet this want in a way it has never been met yet. And I
do hope and pray there may be no disputed passages in
the book : disputed, I mean, as to their authenticity. There
is nothing that causes more miserable confusion and im-
puting of evil motives and bitter sarcasm on both sides
than that.

2i8 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

The hoped-for conferences were made possible when,
in February, 1903, it was decided to form a society of
men in sympathy with the drift of Mr. Spencer Jones's
essay. The inaugural lecture was given in October, 1903,
to the Society of St. Thomas of Canterbury, and was
published under the title of Rome and Reunion. The
book which Benson hails as needed and imminent never
appeared in that form. Its place may have been taken
by; ^'g', The Prince of the Apostles, to which Mr. Spencer
Jones contributed a preface and some of the chapters.
After the letter of May 27, Benson wrote no more to Mr.
Spencer Jones till he had been received into the Church
in the September of 1903, and indeed announced that
event to him neither before nor after its occurrence,
though he knew Mr. Spencer Jones had been familiar
with Woodchester. This I somehow find characteristic :
he was at all times singularly detached from persons : it
was in moments of enthusiasm, e.g. after reading a book
by an author which had struck him, that he would neglect
convention and introduce himself : he rarely looked
backwards, least of all, perhaps, when, as at Woodchester,
his whole attention was fixed upon the future. However,
this singular acquaintance was not altogether dropped.
The Society of St. Thomas of Canterbury meets in May
and November, and it is a rule that the May meeting
should be addressed by a Catholic. In May, 1908, at
Mr. Spencer Jones's request. Father Benson gave the
lecture, taking, once more at the Society's request, " some
aspect of Infallibility " to speak upon. His lecture has
since been published by the Catholic Truth Society under
the title of Infallibility and Tradition.^

^ A pleasant little incident survives. " On that occasion, " writes Mr.
Spencer Jones, who had never seen Benson, and was never to meet him again,
" I remember when we were waiting for people to arrive, Fr. Sydney Smith

CONVERSION 219

Benson with considerable acumen fastened on the vital
point of this discussion, namely, the relation of the Pope's
infallibility to that of the Church as a whole. It was long
before he fully satisfied himself as to the sense in which the
Pope's infallibility could be regarded as separate, or whether
papal pronouncements had any right to be more than
expressions of the general belief. Were the papal words,
so to say, put into his mouth as the result of Catholic
belief, or could the Pope so speak as to form Catholic
belief from above ? He was helped towards solving this
difficult question in the Catholic sense by his monarchial
predispositions and his entire detestation of dictatorial
democracy ; ^ but he struggled for a long time, in the
interests of reconciling the papal supremacy with the
theory of the Church Diffusive, to assign to the Pope
something of that position which Father Tyrrell, writing
as Ernst Engels, did in The Church and the Future.

Meanwhile he put himself into touch with Father David
Richards, whom he had known at Cambridge and East
Mailing. Father Richards was a young man of quite
exceptionally gentle and lovable character, and his letters
have much fragrance of affection and reveal a readiness
to serve his friend to the utmost of his power. He had
been for some time chaplain to the East Mailing nuns ; had

said to me, ' I suppose you will begin soon ? ' to which I replied, * When Father
Hugh arrives.' ' I am Father Hugh,' said the priest who was standing by his
side. He looked to me almost a boy, I remember."

^ " Personally," he wrote in 1902, being exercised at the time by the
thought of the Boer war, " I believe that we are beginning to rot. Every nation
has its chance, and loses it : and I think we are showing signs of having done
that. [ • . . ] I am getting rather upset at the way the Church of England is
going on. It appears to me that she is being guided by popular clamour, instead
of herself guiding it. And this is upsetting to me who believe that the Church
is a monarchy, and in no sense a republic. This hateful democratic spirit is even
daring to lay hands on the Ark itself."

220 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

been received into the Church, and ordained at Rome. He
was to become, a little later, a member of the Dominican
Order, and it was owing to this that Father Benson made
his way to Woodchester for reception. Father Richards
died in Mexico of consumption.

Father Benson began to write regularly to Father
Richards about the middle of July, 1902 ; but the first letter,
which shows that he had asked the Catholic priest for
information upon the quality of his theory of the papal
claim, is dated ist December [1901]. In it Father Richards
says that he has submitted the difficulty to sundry theo-
logians, one of whom. Prior Vincent McNabb, O.P., then
Prior of Woodchester and now of Hawkesyard, Rugeley,
wrote out an excellent memorandum on the subject. The
essence of his answer was, naturally, that while there is
only one "infallibility" granted by Christ, so that no
rivalry, as it were, of infallibilities is conceivable, infallible
Pope proclaiming against infallible Church, yet infallibility
is properly granted to those who possess it ex sese, that is,
directly and not derivatively. Thus the Pope can speak
immediately, and yet infallibly, nor does he need to consult
the Church before speaking, though he may do so, and
possibly ought to, and usually does.i By far the most
solemn definition of recent times is that of the Immaculate
Conception. This was, however, given after prolonged
consultation only : equally certain is it, that no appeal is
now theologically conceivable from the voice of a defining
Pope to a Council claiming, so to say, perhaps to override
the papal pronouncement.

^ Much confusion of mind exists among non-Catholics by failing to distinguish
between infallibility, which is a negative charisma, and inspiration. Infallibility
means that the Pope is prevented from teaching error ex cathedfu ; not that he
need receive any special and divine illumination in that teaching, such as is
essential to inspiration, nor indeed that he need so teach at all, i.e. so far as
the actual gift of infallibility is concerned.

CONVERSION 221

" Needless to say, I did not tell [Father McNabb] your
name/' writes Father Richards, " or that you were on the
point of making your submission to the Holy See."

Either then Father Richards misinterpreted Benson's
nearness to the Church, or the pendulum had swung
nearer Rome for the moment than it was to remain.

However, Benson had come across some phrases which,
if they were accurately quoted (and this I think possible),
presumably came from the frantic pen of some French
journalist. The Pope was called " Spouse and Co-partner
of the Church " ; the Depositum Fidei was " lodged in his
brain '^ ; a French bishop was fantastically represented as
saying that the Pope was the Incarnation of the Holy
Ghost. From these absurdities, which were either never
spoken, or were due to a rhetoric detestable in taste and
(objectively considered) heretical in their essence. Father
Richards had not the slightest difficulty in turning Ben-
son's mind to the necessary dogma and the authoritative
meaning of its formula.

Besides Father McNabb, Dom John Chapman, O.S.B.,
of Erdington, was being enlisted by Father Richards to
help his friend. Dom John had received Father Richards
into the Church, and to him Father Richards used to
forward Benson's letters, which profoundly impressed
him with the candour and intelligence of their writer.
The name and address were at first carefully cut out,
so that the identity of the writer was kept concealed.
Dom John helped Benson much, from the immense
resources of his patristic knowledge, in regard to historical
questions relating to the earlier ages of Christianity and
the Papacy in its less developed form ; in fact, from him
Benson went nearer than ever else towards getting that
catena of patristic proof he needed. Dom John showed

222 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Benson's letters to his colleague, Dom Bede Camm, well
known for his historical works upon the English Martyrs
and the Reformation period generally; so Benson had
enlisted on his side experts who should guide his dogmatic
inquiries and historical researches ancient and modern
alike.

In Lent, Benson was sent with Father G. Waldegrave
Hart to conduct a mission at St. Giles's, Cambridge. It
was the last he was to preach as an Anglican, and it
was to him a source of mingled joy and horror. As a
mission it was successful. "Your sermons," wrote the
Rev. J. Buxton, the vicar, " have had more effect in
stirring men to think than any effort of the kind which
has been made for them at St. Giles's since I came here."
Yet, again and again, after his sermon, he would come
back to the room he shared with Father Hart, and, bury-
ing his face in his hands, would groan, " I cant go on."
To preach, when perchance he had not been " sent,"
was agony to him.^

On Easter Sunday he preached on St. Mary Magda-
lene at Tunbridge Wells, and never again entered an
Anglican pulpit.

Very exhausted and depressed he went to Tremans
"for peace and quiet." There he found his two brothers,
and after a time complained that he was being drawn by
them into theological discussions. "But, to be quite
honest," wrote Mr. A. C. Benson on April 20, "you have
of late become so silent on other topics that it is diffi-
cult to know quite what to talk about — and as a family
we must talk, or, like the lady in Tennyson, we shall die."

^ This mission gave him new light upon the conditions of people he had
long lived among. He wrote to a friend : " Bedmakers and gyps have a harder
time than I ever thought. Did you realise that a bedmaker cannot receive Holy
Communion in term time unless she has a special service before 6 o'clock a.m. ? "

CONVERSION 223

Hugh recognised that, though he undoubtedly felt
"chivied," he could not free his talk from the obses-
sion of his thoughts, and found his brothers nothing but
what was " generous and affectionate." There was no
suggestion that any sort of quarrel might be threatened,
nor that he would find it difficult, at any time, to visit
his home.

At this time his position was communicated to the
Community at Mirfield, who themselves behaved with
nothing but tact, affection, and simplicity. He communi-
cates, too, his distress to the one solitary correspondent
from whom to the end he held but little back.

April 20 [1903]. — I am greatly disturbed in my mind
about the Church of England. It is a dreary old story,
I fear, to us all ; and the air is full of discomfort ; but
this has "infected" me somehow.

He has had this trouble, he explains, for rather more
than a year. Father Frere has known it all that time, and
has given him leave "to stay at Mirfield without any
external work for two or three months and devote my
prayers and mind to the subject." External work leaves
no time or energy. " Work," indeed, " as an antidote
has been unsuccessful."

He foresees that many will consider this to be an act
of cowardly and thoughtless apostasy, and a betrayal of
our Lord's confidence. Herein, however, his conscience
is clear, while

The question of Orders does not come in at all in my
difficulties. So far as history and spiritual experience go,
I am entirely satisfied that I am a priest ; and am continu-
ing to say Mass with complete serenity. In fact, if all
else seems shaken, that remains secure. It may sound a
callous thing to say ; but as far as I myself am concerned,
I am entirely serene, and not at all upset or anxious.

224 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

One does feel confident that all is in God's Hands.
Neither do I feel anything but love and honour for the
Church of England ; and, please God, whatever happens,
that will continue.

He writes again upon this subject on April 23, St.
George's Day, 1903. His correspondent, on her side,
is to listen to no doubts. She, as he, "is in complete
peace as regards Sacramental Grace in the Church of
England." It would be intolerable otherwise. But God
seems to be " opening new doors without exactly closing
old ones."

He is convinced, moreover, that the spirit directing
them is from God, and quotes St. Ignatius's doctrine that
the Good Spirit should generate peace.

Mirfield itself was an " abode of peace " after work. " I
am working away at a book of fourteenth-century devotions
that I hope to publish sometime ; and they generate such
a happy atmosphere." In these simple prayers his spirit
found, perhaps, its only refreshment during these arid
months.

Anticipating, I will quote a long letter in which he at
once guides his penitent in the first stages of her "con-
version " and indicates to us his method as regards
his own.

May 4 [1903]. ... As regards the other matters, I
entirely agree that you should keep yourself from decision
so long as you are in this state of health. In fact, the
only satisfactory decisions that are ever made, I think,
are those in which God forms a conviction from the
bottom of the soul upwards, so to speak, so that when
it reaches the top and emerges into action and manifesta-
tion it is beyond all question or reconsideration a solid
conviction of one's entire personality. ... Of course all that
needs patience and tranquillity ; but it is worth great
struggles after self-repression to win the solidity of such
a conviction. [. . .]

CONVERSION

225

One's soul is in departments. Let me illustrate by a
diagram. So long as one is in grace, in the "ground
of the soul " there is always the " spring of water " of
which Our Lord spoke to the Samaritan woman. This
spring is continually rising and falling. For perfect
sanctification it ought to be continually at high flood,

a = ground of the soul
(5 = will
^= heart
</= intellect

right up through b, c, and d; i.e. the will should be
converted, the heart kindled, and the intellect illuminated.
And that process ought to be practically always in that
order. First, the will should be converted, so that one
is entirely resigned, and only desirous of knowing God's
will ; then the heart is drawn to love it. One becomes
full of burning desire — and at last the intellect understands
and perceives.

Now, for a complete conviction of anything, all these
compartments of the soul should be filled ; i.e. however
much one's heart may love the Roman system and
circumstances, yet one must not go until the intellect is
either " informed " as to difficulties, or at least " satisfied "
that there is an explanation somewhere. [. . .]

If you apply [this thought] to all kinds of souls and
circumstances, it seems to work out. At the conversion
of an ignorant sinner, it is wonderful to see how the
fountain of water that has always been there, though at
a very low ebb, suddenly rises in a flood and penetrates
every part of his being ; so that he loves and prefers
religion to irreligion, and all his intellectual difficulties
are simply swept away at once. Then after conversion
it generally ebbs a little ; and the work of sanctification
consists in the perpetual movement and flow of the
I P

226 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

" water of life." Every good act of the soul sets it in
motion ; every sin drives it down again.^

On her side his mother wrote :

April 23. . . . What you say about controversy makes
me say what has been hovering in my mind of late. You
said some little time ago that you felt you knew thoroughly
the side you had been brought up in, and that there was
no need to go into that any more. I didn't think it quite
sound at the time, but I scarcely knew why, and now I
have a clearer view. This — I think your present place is
clear to you — that must be. But I think the thing, or
view, one was brought up in is often by no means so clear
to one in its reasonable largeness as the views one has
come into later. One takes so much for granted in the
early years without reasonable examination. Might not
it be well, at this critical juncture, in order that no
pains may be spared to omit nothing of the whole case,
that you should go into it thoroughly with some moderate
person who has thought out his position ? Of course the
Archbishop occurs to my mind, merely because he is so
very moderate, reasonable, and fair, and because I am
sure he would do anything for your father's son. I
haven't breathed a word to him about wanting this — and
of course you may prefer someone else, even if my feeling
about doing the thing commends itself. Still, I would
urge it on your consideration. I want you to leave nothing
undone which would in any way really contribute to a
knowledge all round.

No letter could have been more fearlessly generous,
more large and loyal. Yet one can see that it will be able
to influence Hugh's mind but little, though it will direct
his behaviour. There are moments when a man knows
well enough whether his education has indeed ministered
adequately to the exigencies of his life ; he gauges his

^ This ingenious analogy suffers from all the difficulties attendant on any
division of the soul into "faculties." Where has the "water " sunk to during
sin ? What if a becomes converted, but not c ; or a, b, and d, and not c ?
The department <r is a very difficult one to define in strict psychology. On the
whole, I think Benson would, later on, have inverted the departments c and b.

CONVERSION 227

power of living off his education, by an innermost experi-
ence. At a crisis, a man can look round, see what his
sanctioned past has offered him, and can exclaim, " I am
dying of this." A nervous man, moreover, tender and
delicate to a fault in his affections and pieties, may suddenly
feel that his temper is at snapping-point ; " I cannot stand,"
he avows, " hearing those arguments again." Courtesy can
only be ensured at the cost of a kind of general deadening
of the emotions. Finally, the very word " moderation " may
lash him to indignation. Moderation, he feels, will never
settle anything to do with Christianity. Nd<p€ koX fiijuvaa
ama-Telv,^ wrote the cynical poet ; " a godly, righteous, and
sober life," the Anglican prayer-book asks : " Blood of
Christ, inebriate me," are the words of a Catholic prayer
Hugh loved. Quite apart from his absolutely clear per-
ception of the ultimate scepticism implied in much of the
cult of " moderation," Hugh felt that any creed that was
true demanded a tremendous sqlf-surrender. " I believe,"
one wrote timidly to him in later years, "that if only I
could find myself in Catholicism, I could swim." "Then,
for God's sake," he answered, " jump ! "

For the sake of long affection he denied himself the
happiness of a quick adventure, and returned to plod,
at Mirfield, at the books. Only, the Community were once
more apprised of his pain, and betook themselves to prayer
and kindly silence.

Early in May, Father Richards writes to him again,
offering once more the hospitality of Woodchester, its
peace and width of welcome, and wise "leaving a man
alone." ^ For the second time, the predestined name of

^ " Be sober, and remember to distrust."

2 "You," said Newman once to Dr. Russell of Maynooth, "did more than
any other to convert me ! " " How ? " asked the astonished priest. " By letting
me alone," said Newman.

22 8 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Father Reginald Buckler recurs beneath his pen. Mean-
while, the web of prayers Father Benson will so often
draw around his converts, is closing in upon himself.
The Dominican nuns have long been praying for him. . . .
Often the Mass is being offered for him. . . . Only, Father
Richards urges, let his soul remain alert. A film of
Quietism, so to say, has dulled the sharp colour of his
letters lately. . . . Herein is reflected that numbness which
Benson's overstrain of soul was bringing on him. Two
days later Father Richards recurs to Quietism, and men-
tions the Preface, by Father Wilberforce, O.P., to Blosius's
Institutio Spiritualis, edited by him. The spiritual waters,
going softly, should refresh the wastes of controversy : he
has already recommended Manning's Temporal Mission of
the Holy Ghost; again, the "short pithy sentences " in that
part of Newman's Loss and Gain entitled Questions for One
whom it Concerns are thought by him suited to stimulate the
soul flagging beneath the concatenated arguments. Finally,
he bids him " rest his mind," wearied of the study of
the Church's " notes " of unity, apostolicity, and the like, by
the quiet contemplation of her great glow of Sanctity.

He was not, however, to find his rest, from books or
persons, for a while. r, -f ./h. «: to

His Superior visited Tremans, and on May 27, 1903,
Mrs. Benson wrote :

... It has been so good having Father Frere here — he is
delightful, and I don't wonder at your fondness for him.
We talked long and late. I lay awake nearly all night in
the thought of you, and at 7.30 he celebrated ... it
calmed all, and made one strong for whatever has to be
borne.

He read your letter quietly through — so I know all
your mind as expressed there. I feel scarcely to know
what you and he will come to in talk to-morrow — but I
cannot believe that in dealing with a man like that, and

CONVERSION 229

you, there need be, or will be, any bitterness, or rash
action, or anything for which there should be regret. . . .
One thing he comforted me upon — he is quite clear about
your coming home on June 15. That is what I crave for.

You know how strongly I have felt with you that none
but the great issues should be considered, and you will
realise how I have kept all personal feelings out of it to
the best of my ability. You know well enough what a
terrible blow any such step would be to me if I looked at
it personally — what a sorrow it must be, if it happens.
But this is not the level on which I take it with my heart
and will. I know your utter sincerity of heart, and I only
desire that knowledge and thought should come up to
that — and I am not unmindful — dearest son, how could
I be ? — of all your pain and conflict and patience — and all
the gentleness and sweetness which have been growing
greater day by day.

Father Frere told me of Lord Halifax's desire that
you should go out to Italy and see him . . . and now in
answer to your tender and dutiful wish to see anyone I
should like you to see, may I say that I do strongly desire
that you should see him.

I can't forget how good he was to you in 1901, and I
know how sweet and altogether acceptable his atmosphere
and way of looking at things is to you. So I am not
asking a hard thing. . . .

No one, Mrs. Benson adds, not even the Community, can
wish save that you should follow God's guidance " when
all has been done." The Whitsunday and All Saints'
collects were felt by her to bring home to the soul the
facts of ''the guidance of the Comforter and the vision
of the Blessed Dead."

Meanwhile he was back in controversy. Father
Richards himself, at Benson's wish, had to take to argu-
ment, though none that I else have seen has been so
sweetened by the charm and humility of the writer. " But
perhaps," he concludes an argument from authority which
in effect weighed much with Benson, '' I speak as a fool,
indeed I am sure I do, if there is anything of my own

230 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

in what I say. . . . Please tell me if my letters worry or
distract you. Yours help me not a little, for they assist
me to look at the matter from the point of view of another
mind ; and perhaps I am too apt to fancy that the road
I came on is the only one that leads to Rome. — Always
yours affectionately." ^

At Mirfield his reading was terrific in extent. His
Confessions mention a dismal list : " Dr. Gore's books,
Salmon on Infallibility, Richardson, Pusey, Ryder, Little-
dale, Puller, Darwell Stone, Percival, Mortimer, Mallock,
Rivington ; . . . a brilliant MS. book on Elizabethan his-
tory . . . and, supremely, Newman's Development and
Mozley's answer " (p. 99). " To me," he wrote,^ " (New-
man) is the Prophet, but to many I know he is merely
sophistical."

But from these a few stand out.

To Father G. Waldegrave Hart he wrote on May 19 : '

But I have just been reading to-day an irresistible book
— Mallock's Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption. My WORD !
It is a masterpiece. Really, honestly, I have practically no
further doubts.

I wrote to the Superior yesterday, telling him how
imminent was my departure, and I feel almost inclined
to wire to-day. But I shall wait about three or four weeks
more, and then retire to Retreat.

This is all very sad.

^ It is pathetic to notice that one of Benson's by-difficulties, so to call them,
was the view the Church took about cruelty to animals and the survival of
their " souls." Father Richards collected a good deal of theological material
on the topic and forwarded it, with much tolerance of view and wise comment,
to Benson.

* Spiritual Letters, p. 31.

* It is in this letter that a note of intimate pathos occurs. Father Hart was
ill. " I am grieved to hear you aren't out of pain yet," Benson writes. " But
'Nay now, it's drawing it out — be still, child.'" These phrases were familiar
upon the lips of his old nurse, Beth, who used them in the nursery when
mustard plasters had to be applied to her restive babies. At this crisis in Hugh's
spiritual growth the words recurred, the more easily because he was schooling
himself, mentally, to become once more a little child.

CONVERSION 231

" Mallock," he wrote again {Spiritual Letters, p. 31), "is
simply overwhelming, and he is not a Roman Catholic."

Another book whose name often recurs in the letters
of this period, though not as frequently as Mallock's, is
Reunion Essays, by Father Carson. In May, 1903, Hugh
writes to Rev. J. H. Molesworth :

I have just been reading a fascinating book by Carson, a
Roman priest, called Reunion Essays. Have you seen it ?
Its description of the Roman Church as an embryo,
showing the same characteristics, is very able. He is a
disciple of Newman, and a great Liberal in theology —
remarkably so. In fact, he quotes our divines a good deal
more than his own, especially Gore, though he can't
follow him in the ''kenotic theories" of "Lux Mundi," &c.
It is really worth reading from every point of view.

Father Carson's book was considered in some points
unsatisfactory by Roman Catholic theologians. This is
not the place to discuss the extent or character of its
shortcomings. These need not, at any rate, have been
such as to preclude it from helping Benson on his Rome-
ward way.

But in May he definitely began to struggle. You may
have seen an animal, which you had thought numbed, if
not to dying point, at least to non-resistance, fight
frantically, on a sudden, for its life, and then collapse.
The fight at least had come. Hugh loved Mirfield, but
for the moment all he asks is to escape. He begged to
be released at once from his obligations, and to go and
stay in a Catholic convent. The atmosphere was stifling
him ; the chains were breaking him down.

His Superior, in a kind yet most reasonably firm
communication, told him that it was impossible for the
Community or for himself to allow him to go and stay
in a Roman Catholic convent as long as he was a

232 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

member of a Community which was in all loyalty bound
to a Church whose authority and communion such a
convent would repudiate. His "pledge," he urged, still
bound him, and he could not be released till late in
August. Profession doubtless was of varying value and
import to different brethren ; but Benson had wished
to feel himself to be more and not less definitely pledged
to the Community. To go over to Rome, Fr. Frere
declared, was wrong, an error in judgment, a defiance
of authority, a repudiation of sacraments and graces
received, and therefore sacrilege. This the Community
might grievedly contemplate, but not facilitate. To
Benson, his request for retreat in a Catholic convent
might appear on a par with that for leave to write to
Father Tyrrell and Father Richards. No ; that had been
a policy of hope, in order to keep Hugh back, though
even to write to Tyrrell appeared to involve some slight
disloyalty. "To our utter surprise, the answer was a
more definite decision in that sense than you or I had
conceived to be possible ; and ... I cannot but think
that in that unexpected way to which we were strangely
led you had your real guidance from God." Anyhow,
he repeated, what Hugh needed was not retreat and
peace, but " serious examination of the reasonable grounds
by which your faith ought to be supported ; it is your
intellect that you have need to give fair play to, rather
than your soul." Benson had, unknowingly, shirked;
he had " an unreasoning dread of and grudge against reason
and intellect."

You are like a man looking about for a surveyor to come
and guarantee to him that the foundations of his house
are secure, rather than run the risk of examining them
and finding them insecure ; they are secure enough all

CONVERSION 233

the time, or could quite easily be made so ; but he daren't
face the risk that it might be otherwise, or contemplate
the possibility of making necessary alterations or repairs
in order to make them secure. [He instances Benson's
terror of Biblical criticism.] Some [he continues] keep up
their " blind refusal " after going over, to the end, as, for
instance, Manning, with the result that other honesty
besides intellectual honesty has become warped and con-
science has ceased to protest in that sphere. Others, like
Hutton, Addis, Bradley, and Co., relapse into Rationalism
or Unitarianism under the angry revenge of the intellect.
Others, finally, . . . come back to the faith.

This was heavier artillery, it may be, than was realised
by the author of the letter which we have summarised.
Apart from his condemning the jaded man to a further
instalment of his Sisyphus task, he roused also in his
brain the spectres of a possible moral collapse, or destined
rationalism ; of a defiance of God's will already, it may
be, accomplished, and yet worse projected. Those who
play on these strings scarcely know how terrific is the
reverberation, in a tortured brain, of phrases like " return
to the faith."

Benson wrestled yet once more. Might he put himself
into " formal communication with Roman Catholic autho-
rities during the thirteenth month ? " Well, presumably, he
might be absent, and no questions asked, should a Chapter
agree to it. The Community could not grant even this
" with its eyes open." That is, it could allow it to happen,
but not explicitly arrange for it.

Meanwhile a measure of refreshment was to be given
him. He might leave Mirfield from mid-June to mid-
July, provided he keeps on neutral ground. He flies to
Tremans as to a house of refuge ; he will not wait even
to pack, though in his heart he knows he will never return.
Yet he, on his side, must tear himself away from the

234 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

house that cHngs to him. He kisses its doorposts as
he goes, and his heart feels broken.^

II

At Tremans he found his brother Arthur, and from
his book of reminiscences, Hugh, I will quote the follow-
ing passages :

Hugh's dejection, which I think was reserved for his
tired moments, was not apparent. To me, indeed, he
appeared in the light of one intent on a great adventure,
with all the rapture of confidence and excitement about
him. As my mother said, he went to the shelter of his
new creed as a lover might run to the arms of his beloved.
Like the soldier in the old song, he did not linger, but
"gave the bridle-reins a shake." He was not either
melancholy or brooding. He looked very well, he was
extremely active in mind and in body.

I find the following extract from my diary of August :

^^ August, 1903* — I^ the afternoon walked with Hugh
the Paxhill round. Hugh is in very good, cheerful spirits,
steering in a high wind straight to Rome, writing a historical
novel, full of life and jests and laughter and cheerfulness ;

^ J. H. Newman wrote to W. J. Copeland, ot his final departure from
Littlemore — " I quite tore myself away, and could not help kissing my bed,
and mantelpiece, and other parts of the house. I have been most happy there,
though in a state of suspense. And there it has been that I have both been
taught my way and received an answer to my prayers." Mr. W. Ward has
reminded us that so, too. Reding, in Loss and Gain, kisses the very willow-trees
of Oxford when he must leave it.

Like Newman, too, Hugh looked wistfully back towards the home he was
never to see again. " I have never seen Oxford since," Newman wrote wistfully
in 1864, "excepting its spires, as they are seen from the railway." Fate was
kinder to him than to Benson, and one day he did return. But for Newman to
return to Oxford was an event of dimensions incomparably vaster than any
return of Hugh's to any Mirfield.

Naturally it was felt awkward, at first, by Mirfield, to receive back one so
frankly an "apostate"; besides, I understand that if permission to return had
been granted to him, a precedent would have been set which in a particular
instance it would prove difficult, though expedient, to avoid following. Individu-
ally, the Fathers of Mirfield showed themselves in no way vindictive ; Benson

CONVERSION 235

not creeping in, under the shadow of a wall, sobbing as
the old cords break, but excited, eager, jubilant, enjoying."

His room was piled with books and papers ; he used
to rush into meals with the glow of suspended energy,
eat rapidly and with appetite — I have never seen a human
being who ate so fast and with so little preference as to
the nature of what he ate — then he would sit absorbed
for a moment, and ask to be excused, using the old childish
formula : " May I get down ? " Sometimes he would come
speeding out of his room, to read aloud a passage he had
written to my mother, or to play a few chords on the
piano. He would not, as a rule, join in games or walks —
he went out for a short, rapid walk by himself, a little
measured round, and flew back to his work. He generally,
I should think, worked about ten hours a day at this time.
In the evening he would play a game of cards after dinner,
and would sit talking in the smoking-room, rapidly con-
suming cigarettes and flicking the ash off with his fore-
finger. He was also, I remember, very argumentative.
He said once of himself that he was perpetually quarrelling
with his best friends. He was a most experienced coat-
trailer ! My mother, my sister, my brother. Miss Lucy
Tait, who lives with us, and myself would find ourselves
engaged in heated arguments, the disputants breathing
quickly, muttering unheeded phrases, seeking in vain for
a loophole or a pause. It generally ended by Hugh saying
with mournful pathos that he could not understand why
everyone set on him — that he never argued in any other
circle, and he could only entreat to be let alone. It is true
that we were accustomed to argue questions of every
kind with tenacity and even with invective. But the fact
that these particular arguments always dealt with the in-
consistencies and difficulties of ecclesiastical institutions
revealed their origin. The fact was that at this time Hugh
was accustomed to assert with much emphasis some ex-
tremely provocative and controversial positions. He was
markedly scornful of Anglican faults and mannerisms, and
behaved both then and later as if no Anglicans could have
any real and vital belief in their principles, but as if
they must be secretly ashamed of them. It used to remind

stayed at the home of one of them; and he in his turn made a brief sojourn at
Hare Street. But to be frank, Benson had been uprooted, and after transplanta-
tion he was not destined to find any of the old soil clinging about him.

236 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

me of the priest in one of Stevenson's books, who said
to Stevenson : <' Your sect — for it would be doing it too
much honour to call it a religion," and was then pained
to be thought discourteous or inconsiderate.

Discourteous, indeed, Hugh was not. I have known
few people who could argue so fiercely without personal
innuendo. But, on the other hand, he was both triumphant
and sarcastic.

Here is another extract from my diary at this time :

*' August, 1903. — At dinner Hugh and I fell into a fierce
argument, which became painful, mainly, I think, because
of Hugh's vehemence and what I can only call violence.
He reiterates his consciousness of his own stupidity in an
irritating way. The point was this. He maintained that
it was uncharitable to say, 'What a bad sermon So-and-so
preached ! ' and not uncharitable to say, ' Well, it is better
than the sickening stuff one generally hears ; ' uncharitable
to say, ' What nasty soup this is ! ' and not uncharitable
to say, ' Well, it is better than the filthy pigwash generally
called soup.' I maintained that to say that, one must have
particular soups in one's mind ; and that it was abusing
more sermons and soups, and abusing them more severely
than if one found fault with one soup or one sermon.

" But it was all no use. He was very impatient if one
joined issue at any point, and said that he was interrupted.
He dragged all sorts of red herrings over the course, the
opinions of Roman theologians, and differences between
mortal and venial sin, &c. I don't think he even tried
to apprehend my point of view, but went off into a
long rigmarole about distinguishing between the sin and
the sinner ; and said that it was the sin one ought to
blame, not the sinner. I maintained that the consent of
the sinner's will was of the essence of the sin, and that
the consent of the will of the sinner to what was not in
itself wrong was the essence of sin — e.g. not sinful to drink
a glass of wine, but sinful if you had already had enough,

" It was rather disagreeable ; but I got so used to
arguing with absolute frankness with people at Eton that
I forget how disagreeable it may sound to hearers — but it
all subsided very quickly, like a boiling pot."

Hugh spent his time "working furiously" at the novel
which was afterwards to become Bjy What Authority?

CONVERSION 237

I shall speak of it below. It was his Essay on Develop-
ment.^

Like Newman, who at Littlemore stood for hour after
hour at his desk, groaning and weeping, pouring out, for
all men to read, his interpretation of history which had
taught him to find living Christianity in Rome, because
in Rome alone was to be found that force which, in
change, preserved identity of life, so Benson feverishly
and in a fashion proper to his personifying temperament,
traced the course of his own Romeward soul, exulting,
even in this hour of spiritual weariness, in his creative
cerebral activity, and he saw that what he made was good.

His brother, Mr. Arthur Benson, writes that he worked
at his novel ''with inconceivable energy. His absorption
in the work was extraordinary. He was reading historical
books and any books bearing on the history of the period,
taking notes, transcribing. I have before me a large folio
sheet of paper on which he has written very minutely
hundreds of picturesque words and phrases of the time,
to be worked into the book.

For a break, Benson went off upon a lonely bicycle
tour, dressed in lay clothes. To Father G. W. Hart he
wrote on July 17, 1903 :

. . . My sister has been ill ; and there are two female
friends of hers in the house now, with whom I eat my
meals. Depressing work !

I have just been a four days' bicycle tour, and have
returned a rich mahogany colour. At Rye, I believe, I
had supper with either Forbes Robertson or his twin
brother. Such a nice man. We talked about the Papists,
of novelists, &c., &c.

Your hymn looks charming. I wish it wasn't in A.
It is a sealed book to me — that key. And I wish you

^ By IVhat Authority ? is described below, p. 353 sqq.

238 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

had put B instead of Gj^the last note but one. But the
tune is excellent.

His tour had taken him first to Parkminster, the
famous Charterhouse in Sussex. He was armed with an
introduction from Father Richards to a convert clergy-
man who was a monk there ; but found himself regarded
as a probably complacent critic, and retired chilled, and
anyhow clear that Parkminster, despite its ominous name,
St. Hugh's, was not to be the place he should choose for
that fateful retreat he descried not distant from him.
He stayed a Sunday at Chichester, confessed, was absolved
and told to " cheer up " by the clergyman to whom he
avowed that almost certainly his goal was Rome, and for
the last time attended a Cathedral service ^ and received
the Anglican Holy Communion. He bicycled home after
his passing through Lewes and Rye, by way of May field.
At the ancient convent walls he gazed with " gnawing
envy," and prayed, for a moment's peace, in the village
Catholic Church.2

In the same letter he says :

To-morrow I go to Lambeth for a few days, to dis-
course with the Archbishop, among other things, on MY
ecclesiastical views. I am going to see Trevelyan and
Lord Halifax also. But I fear, I tear. . . .

And to another correspondent he was writing :

Let me tell you that I am seriously upset in my mind
about the Church of Rome and the Church of England.
It is a dreary old story, I am afraid ; but, dreary or not,
I am one of the characters in it now. Again, don't be

^ He had once laughed at Cathedral services to Mrs. Benson, but in his heart
he loved them.

* Mayfield Convent of the Holy Child consists in part of the ruins of the old
Palace of the Archbishops. The three magnificent arches of the Great Hall are
embedded in the architecture of the nuns' chapel.

CONVERSION 239

alarmed, I am not going to put my arguments before you.
They are very long and elaborate, and have been gathering
like a thunderstorm for about a year and a half, and now
a crash seems close. However, one never knows. I only
mention it " because you are my friend."

Of his visit to Mr. Trevelyan he speaks in his Confes-
sions, p. 118. There this clergyman made use of exactly
the argument which Benson had used against Father
Richards. " How," he had put it, " can there be a sacra-
mental revival where there are no sacraments ? " Now
the argument had ceased to "appeal" to him, and he
said, in fact, that it was not cogent. It was " natural,"
he saw, that a revival should move along lines indicated
by the Prayer Book : God gave greater grace where there
was greater zeal ; it still was not proved, however, that
the mode of seeking it was sanctioned by Him.

His stay at Lambeth was one naturally which de-
manded extreme forbearance, tact, and intuition. Prob-
ably there was here a conflict of two temperaments, as
well as of two theories of religion in ultimate essence
disparate. Benson in his Confessions says that the Arch-
bishop was profoundly surprised that he could submit
to a Church whose methods of worship were in certain
departments or details distasteful to him. Benson urged
that, if he went to Rome, he should go as a child ; having
persuaded himself that there God's voice was speaking,
he would not quarrel with its formulas, still less with its
message, not even with its accent. Whether or no the
Archbishop, as Benson felt, regarded this readiness for
intellectual submission as immoral, he did not disguise
from his guest that he felt, as lodged in himself or in
the Church at large, no supreme and final authority able
and obliged to impose a dogma finally revealed by

240 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Christ. Temperament and taste legislated in the ultimate
court.

As a matter of fact, Hugh, though he respected persons
whose character claimed respect, had no reverence at
any time, 1 expect, for personages. The vision of Hugh
as his father's train-bearer is a charming one ; but he had
never been, as his brother's curiosa felicitas will have it,
one of the Nethinim of the sanctuary.

The Archbishop confessedly found Hugh Benson in-
tractable, and wrote telling Lord Halifax so. Benson
went therefore immediately to Hickleton, Lord Halifax's
house near Doncaster, and stayed there a little over a
week, including, I gather, two Sundays, on which he
still communicated with his host. There never had been
a time when Lord Halifax was anything but utterly sym-
pathetic and affectionate towards Hugh. The friendship
persisted absolutely undamaged by the most searching
cause of separation that human life admits. " Hugh was,"
Lord Halifax wrote to me, after Benson's death, '' a very
dear friend of mine, and I think one of the very most
delightful companions it was possible to acquire. One
may be very fond of many people, whose deaths don't
leave a sense of life being poorer ; but Hugh Benson's
death — at least I feel it so — takes something away which
leaves a particular blank no one else can fill. . . . Some-
how I cannot fancy him as ever growing old, and perhaps
his death, coming as it did and when it did, put the seal
on all that was so delightful and unique in him."

Mr. Trevelyan had directed Benson's eye to the
spiritual energy discernible within the Church of England,
a phenomenon he was in no way concerned to deny ;
the Archbishop, starting from premises which were not
Hugh's, ended naturally in an ideal and scheme of duty

CONVERSION 241

which could even less be his. Lord Halifax's position,
that the Pope's office, evolved by the force of circum-
stances in the Church, was imposed at most de iure ecclesi-
asticOy not de iure divinOy could fairly be set down in
opposition to Benson's. On this the discussion focused ;
and Lord Halifax's strongest practical argument was the
satisfaction expressed by Father Tyrrell and others like
him, that men could stay and work " where you and I are,"
in view of wider, super-personal, and national issues which
individual submission could but confuse. He used also
an argument advanced by Father Waggett of the Society
of St. John the Evangelist in connection with the appar-
ently conflicting claims of religion and science, and urged
that it was possible simultaneously to follow for a while
lines of knowledge apparently divorced, though tempted
to sacrifice one of the two for the sake of immediate con-
sistency. No ; he suggested : there were discontinuities in
knowledge, temporary at least. Suffer them to be so for the
time. Keep close to the salient facts, and trust the future.
Harmonisation would not fail to come, though late.

But though Lord Halifax could take from Benson
much of the dreary drag involved in dealing with adver-
saries who cannot begin to understand a position not their
own, and though Hugh was bright and at ease, talked
happily at table, and succeeded in making long excursions,
in which the Bishop of Worcester (Dr. Gore) was a
partner, without alluding even once to the cause of his
stay, of which the Bishop certainly was aware. Lord
Halifax wrote, when Hugh left Hickleton, that he was a
" hopeless case," and must be allowed to go.

To Hugh himself he wrote with great pathos on
August 25, 1903 :

I think God has work to be done by us in the position
1 Q

242 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

in which we find ourselves, work most important in the
interests of Christendom, and that you will be leaving this
work, and making it more difficult for others — perhaps I
should say depriving them of the help which such an one
as you would so pre-eminently be in bringing people to
the truth, and helping to undo some of the things done in
the sixteenth century. . . .

For the last time Hugh returned home as an Anglican,
still in the same state of spiritual exhaustion. But it was
for a few days only. I think he used no more the little
chapel of which his mother had written exactly a year
ago : " The whole place is so full of you that it is quite
comforting to me." ^

To Miss Kyle he had written on July 29 :

I do certainly think that it will end in going ; but it
has not done so yet ; and I am not absolutely certain. . . .

I cannot imagine why our Lord is giving me these
particular months of uncertainty. It seems to me inex-
plicable. But of course He knows. . . .

And on August 27 he adds :

I am so bewildered that it is like a kind of cautery on
all sensation. I am reading hard some papers a friend
has sent me [these were from Lord Halifax]. But I
believe I shall go very soon.

A little earlier he wrote to Father G. W. Hart, who was
to leave London for South Africa on September 19th :

Here things go along. Divine weather. I work furi-
ously about six hours a day at the very least, and ride a
bicycle for a couple of hours each afternoon.

^ This was the oratory which, as I said, with its adjoining rooms, figured in
The Light Invisible. It was here, too, that he painted (in water-colours) on the
windows tiers upon tiers of Saints. " They were far more visible," Mr. A. C.
Benson tells us, "from outside than from within," and their fantastic silhouettes
won for them the name, among the villagers, of " Mrs. Benson's dolls." Hugh
was thoroughly pleased with them at first, but afterwards effaced them. He re-
turned, however, to the chapel later on ; Mass was celebrated there, and the
whole place is still, if you choose, " full of Hugh."

CONVERSION '^ 243

People are staying here a lot.

I haven't the faintest idea of where I shall be September
12-19. But if I am in London, by Gad, I will let you
know. But even then I too may be starting for Rome !
Quien sabe ?

However, by September 2, his correspondence with
Father Richards enables him to tell his penitent that he
has almost fixed upon a Dominican house for the retreat
which is now clear before him. But he makes it plain to
her they must not meet, nor will he hear her confession.
" Please agree interiorly with me on those points."

Hugh Benson was involved in one correspondence,
and one only, involving real bitterness and conflict of
two souls which should have been at peace with one
another. Dr. Wordsworth, the late Bishop of Salisbury,
a very old friend of Hugh's father, has left a name so
rightly venerated for learning and for virtue that it would
be preferable in many ways to omit any allusion to his
letters at this crisis. Nothing could be further from my
wish than to depreciate a noble memory. Still, the inter-
change of these letters lashed Hugh's nerves to frenzy,
and this element in his experiences ought not quite to be
omitted.

Writing from Pontresina on August 18, the Bishop
surmised that Hugh was looking to the Roman Church
in hopes for a richer Christian life, not through doubt of
salvation in the English, However, the Bishop considers
that—

the untruthfulness of the papal system has gone so deep
into the whole religious life of Roman Catholics, even
of good men, that it would be vain to seek a higher
or so high a life among them, as that which is being led
by many, more quietly perhaps, in the English Church. I
judge this from the case of an old pupil of mine, one of

244 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

the sweetest natures I ever knew, who visibly deteriorated
when he became a Jesuit. . . .

He then discusses the Petrine texts on the old Victorian
lines, showing the customary misconception of Catholic
theology. Writing with extraordinary fidelity to the rules
of the controversy proper to a period now for ever passed,
he exhorted Hugh to travel before he formed opinions
about Rome ; he detected in the homage to the Madonna
and the Saints, and in the " grave deflection of the Eucha-
rist from its proper purpose," " concessions to heathen
instincts within the Church." "Christianity went that
way only in pursuit of secular supremacy." "These,"
says the Bishop most pathetically, having described a
mentality supremely different in structure and process
from Hugh's, "are some of the thoughts uppermost in my
mind, when I try to imagine the reasons which may attract
men of intelligence to accept Roman claims."

On the 26th he wrote with, at first, far more insight
as follows :

Au^. 26, 1902.

... It seems to me that you have been called to be a
teacher and a guide of others too soon in your life, before
you had settled the nature and grounds of your own belief.
Am I wrong in thinking that the process of your mind is
now somewhat as follows ?

" I feel bound to be a Christian. All my experiences
point in that direction. I want also to be a teacher and
preacher. That seems my vocation and my ' talent ' upon
which I shall have to give an account. But there are
many things which puzzle and perplex and even repel me
in Christianity. Nothing but authority can make them
acceptable to me. I want to live without mental struggle
and do my work easily. The authority of the Papacy,
which is at any rate an ancient and a widespread fact of
Christian history, seems what I need."

Then secondly : " It is true that the papal claims are
to a great extent of slow development. But development

CONVERSION 245

is a fact of which we have much experience in other fields
of God's world. Analogy shows that higher forms grow
out of lower, and what remains of lower stages of existence
remain in higher stages. These analogies explain the de-
fects — as they seem from the outside — of the Papacy."

The Bishop proceeds to argue :

I see no personal recognition of the personality of
Christ in your life. " Atonement," for instance, you take
on authority : — that is no use : you haven't realised St.
Paul's " accepted in the Beloved," " holding the Head," &c.

He discusses, too, the nature of Hell ; the authority,
again, of the Papacy, in which he sees the submission of the
clergy to be due to " seminary atmosphere," while the
multiplicity of English sects is but a mark of exuberance
of life. " Analogy," he concludes, " will not hold in the
case of development."

Hugh answers with what the Bishop feels to be "tender
patience " : he is much touched, but rapidly hastens to-
wards rebuke.

Benson contemplates, he cries out, an act of "moral
and spiritual suicide," and will inflict a deep wound on
the Anglican Church. " Your father's and your mother's
son should not do this. Where should respect for Church
authority come to you except in connection with their
teaching and example ? "

He is glad, indeed, to hear that Hugh has personal
devotion to Christ. Still, Papalism is " Christianity with-
out Christ." " It seems to me simply miserable," he cries,
"that a young Englishman, called to win souls to the truth,
should abdicate responsibility for his own soul in order to
escape the trial which exercise of faith involves." The
Papacy is a " strange creation in which policy, arrogance,
superstition, falsehood, force, fraud, secular ambition, and

246 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

love of money have worked together since about a.d. 200,
the time of Pope Victor, to enthrall mankind ; " and he
alludes to the "falsehoods" of "respectable men" like
Innocent I, and theologians like Leo I. He enlightens
him on the trading propensities of French religious ; the
Concordat was " an instrument by which (originally) King
and Pope divided the rights of the Church between them,
and prevented the Church of France, from the reign of
Francois I onwards, from becoming the real power in
the State and exercising its proper influence as a body
corporate." " Heaven forbid that anyone of your name
and family should help to re-establish a similar alien
domination in England." ..." Rome is far more than
you think a money-making institution. The Papacy exists
to supply salaries to the Cardinals, and places to an army
of hangers-on." If the Concordat were terminated, Papal
coffers would empty : it must therefore be preserved at
all costs. ...

My dear boy, what you need is to cease dreaming, and
to become a humble servant of the poor in some well-
[managed parish i] — not too hopelessly undermanned —
where your spirit would find rest in really growing like
Christ in daily tasks.

Once more he wrote, hoping that Hugh would return
to the Church of England safe and sound ; else, he would
lose his Christian faith altogether, or, possibly, become a
"hardened" Romanist. Hugh destroyed this last letter,
though the rest survive. In them we see the revelation
of a tender and yearning mind wasting its passionate
affections over an illusion ; living in a present and fore-
casting a future, with regard to the Roman Catholic life,
after a fashion conceivable by a Catholic only with the

* I think this is right. The Bishop was writing in the train.

CONVERSION 247

most violent imaginative effort. At least it will serve the
Catholic for a lesson of the all but infinite difficulty in-
volved in his appreciating the Protestant mind, when he
sees how a man of immense learning, profound piety,
utter sincerity and deep personal affection, can so mis-
conceive the Catholic mentality.

I cannot refrain from quoting these lines of a letter
from Mrs. Benson to Hugh, dated September 17th :

"These days [the Bishop of Salisbury had written to
Mrs. Benson] have been days of acute misery to me."
He is really suffering very much, and his love of your
father and the Church of England is very strong, and
works in him till he can scarcely bear it. . . . [He had not
expected the change was so imminent.] He has got a big
old heart at bottom.

Hugh really had no difficulty in appreciating what his
insight, no less than his mother's, at once laid hold of.
There was never, in him, the least spark of vindictiveness.

The prayers which Hugh had asked " for one tempted
to secede" had been offered, however, not in vain. On
September 7th he left Tremans, in lay clothes once again,
for the Dominican Priory at Woodchester, where Father
Reginald Buckler, O.P., was awaiting him. Every stage
in this last journey his mother watched in tireless
thought. Each day, almost, a letter follows him.

On September 8th she was writing :

September 8.

Since I saw the diminishing snake curve under the
bridge, in everything but in physical sight you have been,
so to say, nearer than ever; at 6, I pictured the "wait for
'bus'" — about 6.30 your arrival — the evening offices
(blessed) — at 11, when I was going to bed, I hoped for you
asleep, in order to be ready for very early morning — and
now (11.30 A.M.) I think of you either admiring the superb
view, or talking as S. Francis over the door to S, Dominic

248 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

— and the blessing of God over all. ... I am hungering
for to-morrow to hear from you "the programme" as
you said, because I want to tell the household about it
before the rumours from outside reach them, and because
I want — O HOW MUCH — to have a touch from you. Beth's
dearest love.

His elder brother, too, wished him a generous God-
speed :

I say with all my heart that, knowing what you feel,
I couldn't wish you to act otherwise, and I will add God
bless and prosper you !

With the pleasantest Cotswold scenery Hugh Benson
found himself enraptured.

"This," he writes to India on September loth, "is the
most astonishing country — among the Cotswolds. It is
a sort of Scotland — high hills — running streams — and
really steep hills and valleys. I want to live here per-
manently."

Elsewhere he says he found it "like some parts of
Italy" ; and to Miss Kyle he gaily says, "This is a beauti-
ful house in a beautiful country, and contains some beauti-
ful people." 1

This transfiguration affected only what he reached
with that part of his soul which he named external.
Within, he sat utterly still, numbed, contemplating this
romantic outside world, and himself enjoying it as in a
picture. The Stroud omnibus carried him along with
it, seemingly motionless, like a spectator faced by the
moving scenery in Parsifal. He listened to a rosy-faced
old man talking ; he watched some children who were
troublesome. . . .

1 "All that country," he wrote {Spiritual Letters, p. i8) "is bound up with
my own happiness in my mind ; the great hills and valleys, and the miles of
tableland at the top— like the top of prayer : monotonous, with sensational
approaches, but high up."

CONVERSION 249

Down the path from the Priory a lay-brother came to
meet the omnibus, and with him Hugh climbed to the
gates of the church where, almost as in allegory. Father
Reginald Buckler was waiting for him. It is hard to
write as one would about this priest, who unlocked the
greater gates for Hugh Benson, and left with him a memory
of affection undoubtedly unique in his kind. Perhaps you
will remember a novel by one whom Benson loved. The
Cardinal's Snuff-box, and something of what Peter felt to
proceed from the old churchman's mere presence in the
house. " Nor knowest thou," he quoted, " what argument
thy life to thy neighbour's creed hath lent." Father
Buckler was not the " original " of that Cardinal ; but
something of the courtesy, tact, and gentle worldly wisdom
coupled with true interior spirituality of Udeschini was in
the Dominican. And I would dare to say that it may well
be that in him, and in him alone since his days at Kemsing,
he found something of an atmosphere which had a unique
charm for him. There is a delicate and vanishing aroma
which haunts old-fashioned drawing-rooms, and there is
a grave sweetness of thought and quaint stateliness of
language belonging to an age dubbed Victorian mostly in
derision. Few of its gracious ladies and courteous master-
ful old men are now with us, but it is a privilege at least to
recollect what we can never reproduce. Not that I assert
for a moment that these qualities were, so to say, textually
reproduced in Father Buckler's welcome ; but they had
their spiritual and, yes, even their exterior analogies, and a
perfectly distinct atmosphere and colour belongs to all
this episode. Not that Hugh sentimentalised over it more
than over any other part of his life. The Prior, he finds,
is "quite fascinating, with an intense sense of humour,
which greatly relieves the situation." Father Buckler,

2 50 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

owing possibly to his radical simplicity, is "just the least
apt to classify too quickly, and to take silence for con-
sent.* I wasted a day or two through not realising that."
To another, he writes too of a priest " like a white-haired
mouse dressed in flannel — very little and pious and old."
To him he relates how Father Buckler is organist ; he
consults Hugh's tastes ; does he like the tunes ? shall he
play a little Bach or Handel to-night, for a change ? And
would he like to see his sketches ? Besides this, the in-
structor took his disciple for long walks through the
romantic countryside, and was sincerely distressed that
he could not induce him to provide him with some diffi-
culty to explain. ... He gave him the Catechism ; he
begged for questions ; he tried to raise the ghost of In-
dulgences — surely they must scare him ? Not in the least :
Hugh wasn't clear he understood the last word about
them, but he believed them quite without anxiety. . . .
However, the eager Dominican was given his chance, and
expounded Indulgences at satisfactory full length. . . .

To him Hugh showed the typed copy of A City set
on a Hill, and the priest told him there was nothing left
but for him to kiss St. Peter's Chair.^

What Hugh needed most of all was just that amount
of prayer which should keep his tired soul alive without
demanding from it any exercise. He was to rest : even
the supreme operation Father Buckler was resolved upon
performing must be performed without added shock.
Hugh was his own anaesthetic : he was unconscious
even of joy. He heard Mass ; was at the day offices now

^ Many mistakes would have been saved had Hugh Benson's interviewers
been more careful to remember that the extreme politeness which prompted his
silences did not necessarily in the least indicate assent.

* This booklet, published by the C.T.S., contains his favourite arguments for
Catholicism and which need no re-statement.

CONVERSION 251

and then, and always at Compline, of which the Dominican
Salve Regina was the only luminous place in a spiritually
grey day.

Immediately upon his arrival he wrote to his mother
and explained that he would not be baptized, even con-
ditionally, owing to the absolute certainty that his
Anglican baptism had been valid in form and intention,
which, given the Archbishop's knowledge of liturgy and
his constant practice, could scarcely have been otherwise.^
Hugh also mentions the possibility of his receiving
tonsure and possibly " minor orders " directly after his
reception. He would then be able to wear his " customary
clerical clothes," though in the case of his singularly
straightforward mind I think the " humiliation " which
strikes so many convert clergymen with downright panic
— of reverting to lay costume — would have seemed
singularly unimpressive.

On September loth Mrs. Benson answered :

Tremans, September 10.

My Dearest, — Your letter this morning is a wonderful
comfort, and you can understand how hungry and thirsty
we are for every smallest detail. I read every word to
Beth immediately after prayers, and though her face
broke up now and then, she beamed at the end, and is
now deep in the mysteries of the difference between
celluloid collars and linen ones — and I can't unravel that
either. ... I am deeply thankful as to your not being
re-baptized. ... It all sounds very straight and simple —
which is just what one wants — and it is so good that

^ The Catholic practice of conditional baptism of converts is a very frequent
cause of unnecessary disturbance to non-Catholic onlookers. When the convert
has certainly been baptized, or certainly not, the Church uses no further baptismal
ceremony, or baptizes outright. When the Anglican baptism has been doubtfully
administered — and even now, only experience can show how often this is so —
the Church baptizes sub conditione. There never is, nor in the nature of things
can be, r^-baptism. Conditional baptism means, If you have never been baptized,
this is baptism. If you have, it is nothing at all.

2 52 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

there is no pressing or urging — only putting things
before you to see exactly what it means and whether
you can accept all. You will let me know AT ONCE,
I know, when you are actually received, or if you CAN,
before, so that my heart — our hearts — may be specially
with you — I shall just wait from day to day. I intend
to tell the household as soon as I hear from you for
certain — as I should like them to know from within
first. Without, [people] will not be pre-eminently sym-
pathetic. And I am glad about the '' minor orders " ;
it will be a comfort to you to show in your dress exactly
what you are, and not to seem like a layman — it will be
far wisest all round.

Dearest, your words surround my heart with infinite
warmth — it has been just what I so earnestly desired —
how, loving you as I do, could I do anything else ? — indeed,
as you know, we all three were entirely of one mind, and
if you found it, as you did, God bless you, the atmosphere
that helped your soul, why, what blessing and thankfulness
from all our hearts to God ! You have been so preciously
sweet in these months and so eager to do all I asked.

Next day she wrote again :

September ii.

... I am not sorry there are no delays — I am so
glad there is no re-baptism — and I think the tonsure and
the minor orders would be a comfort in a way ... do
come back soon.

I told the household to-day, that they might know
the exact time.

And at 5 o'clock to-day how specially we shall be
with you, my Dearest.

Only keep us posted in every possible detail all so dear
to our hearts. And God's blessing, wide, deep and high
be on you, and God's love full, rich and large, compass
you round.

But on the evening of that day, at 6.30 in the evening,
Father Buckler heard Hugh's confession in the Wood-
chester Chapter-house, and gave him the kiss of peace,
saying, " I shall have to call you in future ' My dear
Hugh.' " Hugh loved this fatherliness, and alludes to it

CONVERSION 253

in letters, always with the corollary, "He is a dear old
man ! "

To his mother Hugh wrote briefly that "it had
happened." She answered at once :

My dearest Son, — I have your note to say "it has
happened," and it was sweet to me to think your first
action on coming was to write this, and O how I wish
you could transport your dear self here — we know you
are ours still, and nothing will ever shake that fundamental
blessed reality of love. For the rest, you are now where
your heart feels you can be truly loyal, where it finds
its home, where you deeply feel God has led you. We
trust you to Him in utter love and boundless hope. . . .
Only let us in, always, wherever you rightly can — be as you
have always been. . . . Letters are showering in . . .
how superficial some are, and how Extraordinarily people
are ready to think you have overlooked some momentous
fact lying close at hand, and that they will kindly draw
attention to it.

On the same day Miss Lucy Tait, the devoted friend
of Hugh's family, also wrote to him :

September 12, 1903.

It has been such a comfort that all these last weeks
we have been all so knit up together. It seems as if the
inner bond had got so much closer as the outer one has —
what shall I say — changed ?

On the day after his reconciliation he received Holy
Communion from the hands of the Prior. Father
McNabb has written to me that :

During these days at Woodchester no great fuss was
made about him. He was left a good deal to himself.
He was extraordinarily untiring with his pen. Every
spare moment was given to writing. I believe he was
then seeing through the press By What Authority. He
was also putting together A City set on a Hill.

His sense of humour was extremely alert. Good
stories found him a good listener, and were usually re-

2 54 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

peated " in kind." The stammer which was quite notice-
able in ordinary talk never dulled the point of his stories.

There was a childlike obedience about him which struck
me as being not a natural gift, but a hard-won acquisi-
tion. It was a noble second-childhood, which spoke of
victory won.

The weariness which he speaks of in his own account
of conversion was only just noticeable, I remember taking
it to be the aftermath of some years at one of our great
Universities. It was but a full-grown Englishman's por-
tion of that self-control which has become a proverb
beyond these islands. [..••]

Within his soul lurked the elements of a tragedy. If
in the end he died the death, as he had lived the life,
of an apostle, it was no doubt due to the years of self-
control which not everyone recognised in the untiring
writer and preacher. Many of the souls to whom his
character appealed by its energy and vivid colouring did
not perhaps realise that elsewhere, in overlooked regions
of his being, lay his strength. Indeed some of those
points of character that made most friends were perhaps
counted by his Judge amongst the dangers of his soul.
In silentio et in spe. Certain habits of thought and
action, of humility in mind and deed, outbalanced the
gifts that some men praised most.

On the Monday he left Woodchester for Talacre, after
a four days' stay only. His experiences read as if it had
been four weeks. " You will be sorry to leave that peace-
ful place and the dear little man," his mother wrote.
" But life goes on and work, and these dear havens, like
our three months together, are like the Arbour for Pilgrims,
I suppose, for refreshment, and not for remaining." At
Talacre, Father Richards, acting there as chaplain to Sir
Piers and Lady Mostyn, was awaiting him. Dreams
added glamour to his going ; he " recognised " his new
surroundings, and felt, half-pathetically, half-whimsically,
that indeed he was coming home.

He remained quietly at Talacre for some time, and

CONVERSION 255

visited the Jesuit house of theology at St. Beuno's, the
Capuchin novitiate at Pantasaph, and St. Winifred's Well
at Holywell hard by.^ Above all, he w^as speculating on
and arranging for his future career. At first it is the
Dominican idea which recurs oftenest in his letters. It
is an open secret that he at first wished to enter that Order,
and I am allowed to say that he actually offered himself
for acceptance as a novice. The Dominican fathers,
however, with genuine disinterestedness, would not permit
any such rapid step, though that he was destined for the
priesthood was clear.

" I have nothing more," he wrote on September 23,
1903, to Mr. A. C. Benson from Talacre, "than the deepest
possible conviction — no emotionalism or sense of relief,
or anything of that kind. All the first week I was with
the Dominicans — who, I imagine, will be my final destina-
tion after two or three years. . . .

" I imagine I shall begin to read theology again, in
view of future ordination." This would take him either
to Rome in November, or to Prior Park, near Bath, where
he could teach as well as read.

Mamma and I are meeting in London next week. She
really has been good to me beyond all words. Her
patience and kindness have been unimaginable.

Well — this is a dreary and egotistical letter. But you
asked me to write about myself.

Well — I must thank you again for your extreme kind-
ness — I really am grateful, though I am always dumb
about such things when I meet people.

^ At Holywell he had a disconcerting experience. The place was crowded
with pilgrims when he, in his grey suit and bowler hat, arrived escorted by
Father Richards. The priest in charge of the well, knowing Father Richards
and his interest in converts, shouted a welcome to him (for he could not reach
him), and asked if he had seen the conversion of Benson, announced that day.
Hugh remained serene, and afterwards went to tea at the presbytery.

256 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Father Reginald Buckler followed up his kind offices
with wise and leisurely advice, supremely in keeping with
Hugh's own tendency of life :

Sept. 21.

Do not, my dear fellow, have any misgivings as to
your vocation to the priesthood — I firmly believe in it.
Your love for the priestly office, and for Divine things,
and your aptitude for the work all point to it.

Benson had some ;^5o a year, and could therefore go
to Rome in sufficient independence ; and in view of his
possible departure thither. Father Buckler introduced him
to Father Paul MacKay, O.P., who had long been resident
there. The important point was to get ordained before
entering an order.

" I am fond of the sentence," Father Buckler wrote on
October 22, when his departure seemed still unsettled,
" * Let us leave room for Providence to work.' If your
going to Rome be delayed, I take it that there are souls in
England waiting for your help to their conversion, and
that if you had been away, you would have missed them.
... In any case, cultivate the ' courageous soul,' and
take the little checks as trials of the spirit, and ride straight
over them — transcend them, to use a nice old patristic
word. How soon a few years go by ! "

He repeated much the same advice after Hugh had
left England :

Nov. 16, 1903.

No doubt I often said that we must 'Meave room for
Providence to work." You will feel, I am sure, that your
present position and work at Cambridge is all part of the
spiritual scheme. " Deus est agens principale " is another
splendid principle. Let God work and arrange for me.
The Divine Element is stronger than the human, in the
Church, although the human is, and has been, and always
must be, so strong.

" Each in his hidden sphere of bliss or woe
Our hermit spirits dwell."

Those two verses (that contain these lines) are to me
quite perfect, and none that Keble ever wrote seem to

CONVERSION 257

compare with them. They are the first two for the
twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity.*

On September 17 Mrs. Benson wrote :

. . . Your letter just come from Talacre — and so
greedily read. You are so good, dearest, and you cer-
tainly are the same R. H. B. — only I want to see you dread-
fully. O Hugh ! What a strange new circle you are
entering on ! You must give them all to me. That is
just my heart's desire — the old circle which we go on in,
you know well — but Pantasaph and St. Beuno's, and St.
Winifred's Well, and Talacre and Erdington Abbey and
the Mostyns — these, and all they mean, you must make
me understand and know.

A gracious and statesmanlike letter reached him from
the Archbishop. After expressing his natural regret at
the step taken by Hugh, he added affectionately :

Sept. 16, 1903.

... I retain, however, the opinion I expressed to
you, that it would have been wrong on your part to have
allowed reverence for [your father's] memory to pull you
into what would have been a dishonest act or series of
acts on your part, your convictions being what they now

^ It is pleasant to know that the relations between the spiritual father and
the son remained intact. Father Benson revisited Woodchester and his old
friend almost at once after his return from Rome ; on which occasion he
obstinately refused to preach to those who had been his teachers. He took a
short holiday once with Father Buckler, and taking him to see over Lambeth,
found the Archbishop absent, but Mrs. Benson unexpectedly there. Father
Buckler never forgot, and was profoundly touched by the kindness of Hugh's
mother, who, as she took his hands into hers, looked into the eyes of the priest
who had put her son "where he longed to be," and said, "I never forget
September nth." Hugh used to send him the handbills of his sermons, and
dedicated the Confessions to him. Father Buckler sent him in return his
Spiritual Journal, for refreshment in wearied moments. Benson never forgot,
and wrote not unfrequently to, this untiring labourer in Christ's vineyard, even
in British Grenada, whither obedience was to send him. The simple, gentle
priest, high-bred none the less, and quoting Horace, full of a brisk, pious humour
too, in the treatment of clinging converts, was a genuine loss to Hugh. The
last piece of his advice I find is that he should read Newman's Loss and Gain,
especially the earlier pages, for an intimate knowledge of the hearts of boys,
and of young men,

258 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

are. I am quite sure that when the choice lies between
a non-natural use of words upon which so much depends
and a change of faith, it is an honest man's duty to make
the change rather than to practise what to me at least
seems to be a course of deliberate evasion or deceit.

Very little but kind wishes followed him even from
those who felt his loss most keenly. Dr. Eden, the Bishop
of Wakefield, wrote most sorrowfully, but with tenderest
affection, assuring him of its continuance and begging
that no bitterness might henceforward alter Hugh's kindli-
ness of heart towards the Church he had left.

Father Frere, writing from the troubled atmosphere of
St. Michael's, Shoreditch, said :

Sept. 13, 1903.

Writing here, I am more grateful than ever for the
manner of it and for all your great consideration and
goodness in doing what was so difficult to all concerned ;
the contrast here could hardly have been more marked,^
and it makes me all the more feel what we all have been
spared of bitterness and misunderstanding. I hope the
Dominicans will be your home, if it isn't folly of me to
say so. It was such a relief to see your address and be
able to think of you in hands that one can far better trust
than some others. . . . Tell us sometimes how things go
on, for there will be many who will want to know, and for
whom many old ties of love and common work and wor-
ship will never be broken.

On his side Father Bickersteth, with more than one
pointe de malice^ broke the news " gently " to forty ladies to
whom he was giving a retreat. They were mildly shocked,
but felt sure that to follow conscience was the best. For
The Light Invisible, destined to be read at table, he rather
slyly substituted Paget's Spirit of Discipline. " Is it un-
fair," he asks, "to tell people as I do that you were
trained by Dr. Vaughan, and that you came to Mirfield

^ The allusion here visible reflects the contemporary misunderstanding of
the recent conversions so sensationally accomplished at St. Michael's,

CONVERSION 259

with certain tendencies which we were able to restrain

but not eradicate ? . . . I hope you are not wearing a

red tie."

The Bishop of Worcester wrote :

Bishop's House, Worcester,
Sept. 21, 1903.

My dear Hugh, — God bless you. May it all turn out
for the best for all of us. — Yours affectionately,

C. WlGORN.

I cannot put " Esq.," and you wouldn't wish for " Rev."
Therefore nothing.

Shortly before this he had heard from Father Tyrrell.
He writes that he is glad, the more sincerely "as I
know you are explicitly aware of what seems to me the
true state of the question in regard to the nature of Church
authority. . . . Either you have seen your way to accept
the extreme view of the matter, which may be the right
view after all . . . or else Fr. Buckler does not share
with me in a scruple which I confess is normally regarded
as somewhat over-refined and pedantic.*' He went on
to recall that sacrifice is sweet at first ; reaction comes,
and need of shut eyes and full trust in " Him who has
Himself deceived us if we are deceived, and who must
see us through the pass to which He has brought us." . . .
He prayed that no tinge of convert fanaticism might mar
Hugh's attitude to those he had left ; he must never be
impatient. Let patronising airs be left as a monopoly to
non-Catholics ; for Catholics, gentleness of judgment, sym-
pathy with mental difficulties, tolerance of intolerance.

Father E. I. Purbrick wrote to Hugh from Clongowes
Wood College, Sallins, Co. Kildare, on September i6th :

Sept. 16, 1903.

This morning I read in the paper of your reception
into the Church at Woodchester, and cannot refrain from

26o ROBERT HUGH BENSON

congratulating from my heart a son of my dearest old
friend, your father. As boys we advanced along the same
path towards the Church, and his conversion was my daily
prayer until his death. I . . . pray earnestly for the
repose of his soul.

Benson answered, and Father Purbrick wrote again,
in words which will be valued by many, on September 19 :

. . . You can have no idea how the news rejoiced my
heart. Your dear father was my oldest and most valued
friend, and my greatest sorrow since I became a Catholic
was, as I ever told him, that he and Lightfoot had not
received the same inestimable grace. So I rejoice more
than I can express that one of his sons is now a fellow-
Catholic. . . . You may depend on my daily memento
henceforth in the Holy Sacrifice.

I have worked through a great pile of letters from
Anglicans, and, to my astonishment, they are nearly all
congratulatory. Some deplore the departure, but by no
means for dogmatic so much as for reasons connected rather
with ecclesiastical politics. Moreover, they are either, in
the mass, from clerics, or from quite poor people.

From one correspondent he received the following :

Sept. 19, 1903.

With what joy I learn that to you has been vouchsafed
the call to "go up higher" ! Whenever this is granted to
any of my friends I always say a " Gloria in Excelsis," like
Dante's holy souls in Purgatory at a brother's release. To
me it has not come yet — or rather God's hand seems still
to bar the path I so long to tread. Pray for me that before
I die I too may have grace to enter the City of Gladness.

To balance this, he heard from others : how, " if I had
not been so great a coward, I should long ago have left the
Church of England . . . but outwards, away from all faith."

And constantly the blame for his departure is laid at
the door of the Anglican authorities. Moreover, a rather

CONVERSION 261

displeasing tone, as of men pitying " the poor old Church
of England," jars not infrequently upon a reader who is
fain to see interior affection and respect accompany ex-
ternal loyalty. One clergyman insists that the fault in the
Church of England lies with the clergy. People are thirst-
ing for full Catholic doctrine ; parsons fear to give it out,
and use " veiled words " ; just enough to satisfy their
conscience.

Rumour says that you leave the English Church not
because you doubt her orders, but because she is so
timorous, and so often gives way before Protestant out-
breaks.

So, too, the clergyman of a church where Robert Hugh
Benson had preached a Mission and a Revival in 1902,
wrote on September 18, 1903 :

I fear there is sad consternation at W , and the poor

Catholics who have been drawn on will have a rough time
of it from their Protestant neighbours and friends.

I grant you things have been very, very trying lately,
and episcopal policy has been almost unbearable. But
it is no new thing to us older ones, who have had to endure
frowns and scoldings continuously ; and what we have
known has been nothing compared with what the Trac-
tarians suffered.^

"Anyhow," the conclusion often is, "it's all very
mysterious ; so much so, that I can safely stay where
I am."

It is sad when men resign themselves to membership
of a Church simply because the pros and cons of organised
systems of Christianity are so bewildering that they can
plead just helplessness to judge as the final motive for loyalty.

^ A fascinating theme of discussion is suggested here. The atmosphere in
which modern conversions take place is so utterly different from that of the
bygone world of Newman.

262 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

A special interest attaches to a letter from the present
Abbot of Caldey ; from it I quote a few sentences :

It seems so hard to go on with the men to whom one
looks to do great things in the cause of Corporate Reunion
dropping off one by one into little reunions of their own.
. . . What a joy it must be, to be in Rome as a Roman,
not as a mere spectator ! . . . Do you remember those
happy days at Mailing when you were "coming on"?
What an anti-Roman you were then !

It was with this Abbot of Caldey, who at last has
followed a like call, that Hugh took refuge to " make his
soul " for the last time, in retreat, not a month before his
death.

From his own letters I will quote two extracts. To
Mr. Spencer Jones he wrote thanking him cordially for
his congratulations, and his sympathetic warning in view
of the singular light-heartedness with which Catholics too
often seem to accept their privileges :

One is still somewhat bewildered in these new sur-
roundings, but I think I know what you mean about the
" apparent flippancy " ; but, as you say, it is a mark of
fearlessness and security in the possession of them.

It also strikes me how very little people on this side
really know of Anglican methods of thought. They see
the inconsistencies and weakness of the other side, and so
on, but do not seem to realise their real points of view at
all. I have been quite astonished in reading some of the
controversial books and pamphlets to see how entirely
they sometimes miss the target — and do not really even
aim at the Catholic party in the Church of England, much
less hit them. It does certainly seem that misunderstand-
ing and contempt are responsible for a great deal of need-
less division.

Next to the saving of his own soul, it does really seem
as if the very first duty of an Anglican who has made his
submission is to do his best to make people on this side
understand a little better the point of view of people on

CONVERSION 263

that. Really, nothing can be gained from drawing carica-
tures of one's opponents.

It is extremely rash of me to talk like this, of course ;
but both from your book and your letters I know that you
will understand what I mean, and that I can say all this
without the danger of your thinking that my submission
has not been whole-hearted and unreserved. For, even
for controversial purposes, it is better for one to know
one's " enemy's " position accurately rather than inaccu-
rately. Your book, I am sure, is of the greatest value, just
for the reason that it insists so powerfully on the need of
looking at things from other people's point of view, if one
is to be of any service to the other people.

To India he had written :

Do write again soon ; I can't tell you how much I love
to hear. And a letter like the last above all. I know you
won't let any " change of religion " mean a change of
anything else. It seems to me shocking that it should do
that.

Lord Halifax wrote almost in the same words :

HiCKLETON, DONCASTER,
Sept. 13, 1903.

My dear Hugh, — It does indeed make no difference as
far as I am concerned. Why should it ? There is only
one Church, and, as / believe, you have merely changed
your opinion as to certain matters on a family quarrel upon
which, from any point of view, there is much to be said on
both sides, and in regard to which neither side is assuredly
blameless. How the matter may present itself to anyone
else — or even to you, cannot affect my judgment of the
situation, and I do beg you to believe, my very dear friend,
that if you are not controversial and unjust — and I cannot
conceive of you as either — your hopes and plans, your
objects and interests, will be just as much a matter of
concern to me as ever they were. God may have a special
work for you, and I pray Him to bless you and it with all
my heart.

So kind were the letters he received that he would often
use the words, " It is a real joy to be written to like that."

264 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

For completeness' sake, let me give these extracts from
his correspondence with Miss Kyle.
On September 12 he wrote :

I am not writing about feelings, and so on ; because,
after all, they can never be trusted ; and there is no need
to write about convictions, even if you cared to hear of
them.

And you need not be afraid that I shall bother you
with controversy, because personally I believe that that is
the longest road to truth, if, indeed, it ever gets there at all.

And again on September 15 fromTalacre:

I told my mother I was troubled in mind more than a
year ago. Of course it was something of a shock to her,
but comparatively slight. Then, as the months went by, I
kept her fully informed, so far as was possible, as to my
state of mind, and ultimately, when my decision was taken,
it was very little shock to her, as the idea had become
familiar to her, I also gave her a promise, or rather an
understanding, which I distinguished from a promise, that
I would not be received without letting her know. The
result has been that neither she nor I are conscious of an
estrangement [ . . . ] It is quite possible, I should think,
too, always to let them [one's parents] know, as it were, by
the way ; and not make an announcement of it. People
are generally shocked if we let them see we expect it, and
not otherwise.

You ask me about my own sensations now. What I
know is this — that I could have done nothing else ; that
everything pointed steadily to the event ; that the Church
of England " was a schoolmaster "... and, therefore, that
I have a great gratitude and tenderness still, and, please
God, always shall have, for her. But that now I have
arrived. Right down below there is all this fundamental
knowledge and certitude that the See of Peter is the one
and only centre of unity. But as for actual feelings, I
may frankly say that I have none at all yet, of any sort-
scarcely even of " dryness." For the last three months my
soul seems to have been completely numbed — no distress
and no joy — at least in the spiritual realm — though plenty
of /%/j-/(:«/ depression and exaltation. Is this very vague ?
I don't know how else to express it. But I am completely

CONVERSION 265

and wholly certain that this step is not the result of
emotions in any sense, but of the coldest sort of conviction.
And perhaps God has sent me this odd state, in order that
I may act from convictions only, and know it.

And on September 29 :

For myself I have never exactly " seen " it ; but I
have "felt" it as in the dark, and I acted in the dark,
knowing, but not perceiving. Now, thank God, after
swaying about out of one's depth, one begins to feel the
Immovable Rock. Let me tell you that you have (i) Poor
Clares, (2) Capuchins, (3) a French convent at Tyburn, all
praying for you, so you need fear nothing. However
dark and cold you feel, do remember that the Poor Clares
alone would be enough to save anyone.

In the negotiations of this period relating to his im-
mediate destination, the name of the late Father Maturin
constantly recurs. Father Maturin's life has been sacrificed
in atrocious circumstances ; in its long record of kind-
nesses, which, we rejoice to know, the wise and affec-
tionate hand of Mr. Wilfrid Ward will shortly render per-
manent, few episodes stand out more worthily than the
persistent interest he displayed at this time towards this
neophyte. Long before, when Benson wrote to him from
Damascus, where the news of Maturin's own conversion
had just reached him, Maturin had kept silence. Now,
his was among the first of the congratulatory telegrams
which came to Hugh.

Before October was over, he had met him.

" Yes, indeed," he writes on the 26th to Miss Hilda
Buckenham, "Father Maturin is just the same, and his
sermons as astonishing as ever. There is really nobody
like him for prodigality of thought and words. I want to
hold out my hand and stop him in the middle, until some-
thing has had time to penetrate my thick brain — something
that I know is good, but cannot appreciate. And he is so
genial and kindly too."

266 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

And rather later on :

I wish you could have heard Fr. Maturin's address. It
was amazing. He went on like a torrent for one and a
quarter hours, and it was all packed with intricate argument
and answer and counter-answer. I can't conceive the
process of mind by which he does it.

Father Maturin was eager that Hugh should enter the
Sulpician seminary in Rome. But it was full, and this
rebuff was the first which Benson's sensitive eagerness to
begin experienced. However, negotiations with the Eng-
lish Church of San Silvestro followed almost at once. The
visit to Erdington Abbey had been successfully accom-
plished, and of it Dom Bede Camm has written to me :

We were asked to invite him to Erdington, as it was
thought some stay in a Catholic monastery would be good,
and he came on to us from Woodchester. I can hardly
say how much I was delighted with him. His enthusiasm
as a Catholic and his humility as a raw convert were
equally touching. He then began to consult me on the
book he was writing on the Elizabethan persecution. I
took him to Oscott, and he was greatly delighted with the
treasures preserved there — the old vestments, the chalices,
missal, altar-stones, &c., of penal days. He poured out
the details of the book, as it was shaping itself, and eagerly
seized on any points that would be of use to him. In the
end it was settled that I should read and correct the proof-
sheets and do my best to help him to secure historical
accuracy. But before that I used to get (after he left us)
sheets of questions, full of historical puzzles, often beyond
my wit to answer.

But since By What Authority was not published till
later, I will reserve what else Dom Bede can tell about its
genesis till I speak more fully of it.

After Erdington he came back, by way of London, to
Tremans.

CONVERSION 267

He writes to Mr. A. C. Benson on October 5, 1903 :

Barton St.

Yesterday I went about a little, and made acquaintance

with churches. It was all very queer, but I suppose one

will feel comfortable soon. The combination of extreme

homeliness and magnificence is very odd, but very striking.

Not long afterwards the date for his departure for
Rome was fixed, November 2nd. " I cannot bear the
thought of it," he writes to his eldest brother.

PART II

NOVEMBER 1903— JULY 1908

Statuit super petram pedes meos : et direxit gressus meos.
Et immisit in os meum canticum novum : carmen Deo nostro.

Psalm xxxix. 3, 4.

CHAPTER I

IN ROME

November 1903-JuNE 1904

Fecisti patriam diuersis gentibus unam :

Profuit inuitis, te dominante, capi.
Dumque offers uictis proprii consortia iuris,

Urbem fecisti quod prius orbis erat.

RuTiLius Namatianus.

I

On the chilly morning of All Souls' Day, 1903, Hugh's
mother once more stood at his side to hearten his de-
parture. Upon the London platform an incident took
place for which our memory will be always grateful.
Immediately on her return Mrs. Benson wrote :

. . . When the last speck of your disgusting train had
gone, L. and I went out of the station, and a firm hand
grasped my arm. I looked round, and there was the
Bishop of St. Andrews ! He had dashed off, on receiving
a letter from me telling him you were going this morning,
hoping to see you off, but just too late. He was delightful^
reminding me that if your father, while he was on earth,
would have wished you at all costs to follow your con-
science, how much more in Paradise, and he said many

delightful things of you too. They aren't all S 's ! . . .

Your room here looks fiendish without you. We went
into your Cathedral as we came back, and prayed for your
safe journey and happy arrival.

Hugh wired his successful crossing, and his mother
wrote again on the 4th :

Beth has been going about like a bird with a broken

wing, but the telegram has heartened her up, and she

271

272 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

sends her dear love. It is all so very exceedingly flat
to us all now you are gone, and we must not be flat.
Even the household gives it as its opinion that " the house
isn't itself without one of Our Gentlemen." . . . O my
son, I want to feel

" And each one that is gone
Has left my heart less lonely " ^

about you too. ... I have had a real prize of a letter
from A. B. about you, which beats X out and out. She
apparently hopes you are a little out of your mind. Such
a simple way of accounting for it !

On the same day Hugh wrote, illustrating his letter
here and there :

San Silvestro in Capite,
Nov. 4.

Here I am at last. Everything on the journey went
off all right ; but it is a long business, and I have been
tearing about all day ever since I arrived this morning.

Nothing at all exciting happened on the way. The
Channel was like a M. P. ; ^ nobody ill at all anywhere ;
the chicken at Calais as usual ; dinner at Paris as usual.

My cabman beat his horse, and I screamed at him^
"Assez de fouet " so fiercely that we crawled all the rest
of the way. Everybody in Paris was wearing a kind of
clerical hat, so they all looked like Low Church clergy-
men [sketch]. . . . Reached Rome half an hour late this
morning. All my luggage turned up; no .douane any-
where except at Calais, where they opened nothing. All

day long Mr. has been taking me everywhere to

buy clothes. He looks magnificent, in a furry hat and
buckled shoes [sketch]. We have the most complete
freedom here. We must be in by 10 p.m., and that is
the only regulation at all of any kind. One arranges
everything for one's self. I went to a coach to-day, Pro-
fessor Lauri, who is going to coach me for two hours
a week, and on Friday I start lectures — two or three a day.

1 From a Catholic hymn for the departed, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton.

* I cannot determine whether Hugh meant a mill-pond, or not.

' After he had been shown over a house which he admired immensely, his
hostess delightedly wrote to Mrs. Benson, " I have never met anybody who
screamed %o much."

IN ROME 273

My room here is splendid — I should say 14 feet high, red-
tiled floor, two big tables, all other necessary furniture,
four chairs, and looks out on to a court, where a fountain
splashes, and a sort of high cedar tree comes just above
my windows. I made the acquaintance of two cats at
lunch, and two parrots after — one kept on saying " Papa-
goletto" = little parrot.

The clergymen here are very nice — missionaries. They
have a house in Africa, and have lost by death there
twenty-two priests in thirteen years ! Climate !

This is a gorgeous place.

... If it is any satisfaction, let me say that the food
here is excellent, with a bottle of wine each, and a glass
of marsala and coffee to follow !

The church of San Silvestro to which Hugh went
was typically Roman, cool, calm, and splendid, with vast
spaces made gorgeous by bronze and marble and damask,
and pathetic with the offerings of the poor. The silence,
broken by the sudden clatter of shifted chairs or jangled
rosary beads, the subtle reminiscence of incense and
burning wax, different in Italian churches, somehow, from
anywhere else, are the more significant in San Silvestro,
seeing that you turn off to it inwards from the uproarious
Corso, or descend from the worldly Quirinal and newer
quarters with their cosmopolitan hotels. You go through
the arcaded passage to the atrium of a church built, with
a monastery, for Basilian monks, by Paul I, pope some
twelve centuries ago. The bodies of two more popes,
St. Dionysius and St. Zephyrinus, and the head of St.
Silvester, are relics there. St. Tarcisius, a boy acolyte of
persecution days, lay there too. Part of the Baptist's
skull had been stored there, and gave the church its
added title of in Capite. This, in 1870, had been removed
to the Vatican ; Hugh was to see it solemnly restored,
but not the Volto Santo, a portrait of Our Lord, painted
in ancient times, and owned by King Abgar of Edessa.

274 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

But the atrium was made sinister by yet other memories
of blood. More than one thousand years ago, Pope St.
Leo III had been dragged into it by a murderous gang,
who stripped him, stoned him, and tore out his eyes
and tongue in San Silvestro. Benedictines had followed
the Basilians, and in 1277 the Poor Clares were given
the monastery, and there, in Franciscan poverty and prayer,
they lived till, in 1849, the ex-priest Gavazzi drove them
out to make room for Garibaldi and his red-shirts. They
returned, but again, in 1871, they were evicted, and postal
and telegraphic servants and public offices established
themselves within these ancient walls " brunis," as Huys-
mans wrote, '' par la priere." Into this haunted atmosphere
Hugh Benson came to live. Enough of the old building
still was standing for the terrific soul-forces, which, by
his own theory, through so many murderous and mystical
centuries must have drenched them, to re-issue, as kind
or dreadful influences, and penetrate his spirit. But at
first his impressions were confused and over-rapid.

His stay, however, in Rome falls definitely into two
parts — the earlier, during which his mind was occupied
with half a hundred different trains of thought and his
days with a rush of vehement activities, and the later,
when all his attention was concentrated on his ordination
and his future. It seems best, therefore, that, after a short
account of the outline into which his daily occupations
fell, I should collect from his letters his dominant im-
pressions and arrange them under certain heads — thus,
his visits to the Pope, his literary occupations, the ac-
quaintances he made, and the like ; and then, that I should
relate consecutively his plans for the future, as, throughout
his stay, they grew, altered, and finally took definite shape
and were realised.

IN ROME 275

Of Hugh's first days in Rome it may most simply be
said that they bewildered and bored him.

On November 11, indeed, he was fresh enough to write
to Father G. W. Hart :

Here, as you see, I am at the centre of papistry. Mr.
and I are here together — the only two Englishmen ;

all the others — he gives a list of some five or six names
— are at the " Beda," which is an annexe of the English
College, and one or two more at the " Procura " of S.
Sulpice. We here have entire liberty ; no rules at all,
except to mention it if we propose to be out after 10 p.m.
But, as a matter of fact, our day is as follows : rise about

6 A.M. ( hammers on my wall). Then we go down

to church about 6.20, and remain there, going " as you
please " till 7.20 — beads, hours, meditation, prayer, com-
munion, while masses rumble on at three altars out of the
nine. (Such a lovely church — frescoed, chapels, marbles,
idols, &c.) Then at any time that we feel we have had
enough, generally about 7.20, we go to the house again,
through a lovely palm courtyard, and breakfast off coffee
and rolls. Then follows a brief breathing space, and then
lecture at the Propaganda, in Latin (!), at 8-9 ; huge crowds
of students — French, English, German, Spanish, Greek.
. . . Then back home and shave and read and write letters
and see people till 12.30; then dejeuner, with coffee after-
wards (!) ; then lecture, 1.45-2.45 ; then sleep or walk till
4 or 5, when I make tea in my own room (high up, looking
on to a courtyard filled with trees, tiled, cool); then
read or write again and go to Benediction, generally in
church about 5.30 ; 7.30, supper ; then talk or hear music
or pray or read till 9.30-10 ; bed. Rather a sound day !

As for ourselves, we look pretty startling too, in huge
furry hats and tassels and ferridas and buckles, and we
go swelling and bulging about as if we had done it for
years.

But on December 4 he is becoming depressed, and
writes to another friend ;

We (i) get up 6-6.30, go down to church and pray
till 7.20-7.30 ; breakfast ; lecture, 8-9 ; shave, dawdle a

276 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

little, and then read till 12.30; dinner, 12.30-1.30; lecture,
1.30-2.30, dawdle and walk till any hour — 4, 4.30, 5,
5.30 ; tea in one's own room ; read ; 7.30, supper ; dawdle,
talk ; bed, 9.30-10. A misspent day rather, with an ab-
normal amount of idleness ; but such is the system, and
one can but follow it.

I dined with B at a hotel near ... he is a good sort,

exceedingly humble. I shouldn't be a bit surprised if he
became a Catholic some day ; he has the sort of mind that
takes easily to this religion. I wish I had ! But, frankly, I
haven't. Nothing in the world would have made me one,
except the certainty that it is true, in spite of all the surface
things that I fear will never be congenial to me.

Well, do send a line again soon to cheer me up. I
am an exile and a wanderer.

He is repeating what he had said to Mr. A. C. Benson —
namely, that on first joining the Catholic Church he felt
like a lost dog ; while on November 26, 1903, he had
written :

My own news is almost impossible to tell, as everything
is simply bewildering. In about five years from now I
shall know how I felt, but at present I feel nothing but
discomfort. I hate foreign countries and foreign people,
and am finding more every day how hopelessly insular I
am, because, of course, under the circumstances, this is
the proper place for me to be, but it is a kind of dentist's
chair.

Not that the maiestas aurea Romce, the sovereignty of
that Rome which had made one city of the world,
escaped him long ; and sometimes his recognition of
Rome's catholicity will be ecstatic, sometimes just a quiet
registration of the fact.

On November 19 he wrote to the Rev. J. H. Moles-
worth :

It is indeed extraordinary to be out here, and to feel
that one is an insider of it all, that one has a recognised
right to Communion, and so on. But I think the thing

IN ROME 277

(since you ask) that impresses me most is the Catholicity as
contrasted with the Nationalism of England. Of course one
has always recognised that variety of temperaments, &c.,
is of God ; but also that the work of Grace is to weld
that variety into a visible as well as an invisible whole,
and it is that that is so wonderfully evident here — e.g. the
first Mass I heard here was said by a German, served by
an African negro, and attended by Italians and myself.
Every meal I am at, too, is shared by English, Americans,
Italians, Germans, Canadians — all absolutely one in faith.
And, above all, the lectures one attends have to be given
in Latin, as the students are English, French, Germans,
Italians, Americans, Canadians, Greeks, Armenians. It is
a sort of sacrament of the City of God every time one goes.
The effect of the argument is tremendous on the assurance
of one's convictions.

And at the very moment that he says, with disconcert-
ing frankness, that he hasn't « the sort of mind " that
" takes to " Italian religion, he never for a moment con-
fuses the ritualistic exigencies of temperament with the
fundamendal reactions of faith. We shall see this more
clearly later on. Meanwhile he notes :

If people of my bringing-up and cast of mind see one
side of things, and have hold of one hand of Our Blessed
Lord, these hot Italians have hold of another ; and one
dare not say that one side is better or truer than another.

One triviality that at first made him despair was the
musical shortcomings of Rome, though fortunately he
began by hearing a papal choir practice " in a dirty little
chapel off a back street," followed by an introduction to
Maestro Perosi. " The singing — Palestrina — was superb."
But this good promise was not fulfilled. On November 15

he and Mr. " wandered all over the place, trying to

find a sung Mass, but could not — it was over in the only
church where they had a respectable choir. The choirs
are fearful here. Horsted Keynes is a paradise of music

278 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

compared to it, except just one or two, which are really
good ; and the organ-playing is awful too." This at least
was saved him when in St. Callixtus's Catacombs he hears
"lovely unaccompanied four-part Palestrina music, with
plain-song."

But besides the austerity of plain-song, the suave
melodies of Anglican hymn-tunes haunt him. He spends
an evening with "a really nice convert lady, who loves
the Church of England and the people in it ; and we
talked like conspirators for two hours ; and somebody
was playing Hymns Ancient and Modern next door all
the while ; and we really enjoyed ourselves." Another
evening he spends in playing these hymns, after " a
funny little men's dinner-party of converts — Anglicans."
" We all said how much nicer they were than anything
we hear in this eternal old city."

Easter, however, especially the Benedictus of Tene-
brae, and, of course, the Exultet, and the singing at the
Benedictine Monastery of Sant' Anselmo, enraptured
him ; nor had he ever heard anything to compare with
the congregational singing of Rome when, at Te Deumsy
for instance, the thousands who had flocked to St.
Peter's would roar the hymn in unison. " I," he adds,
" made a loud, buzzing noise with my mouth. ... I
didn't know the words by heart."

His relations with San Silvestro were at all times
excellent. He catalogues his food-stuffs for the consola-
tion of his old nurse Beth. His John BuUism displays
itself pleasantly enough when meals have to be mentioned.
On November i8 he had rashly allowed it to be known
that it was his birthday.

On Wednesday my health was solemnly drunk by
everyone, proposed by Mgr. (delightful ; a wonderful

IN ROME 279

musician), in a bottle of peculiarly solemn wine, grandly
fetched from the cellar ; and I had to smirk and grin
and pretend it was all right. What queer ways they
have ! I was expecting to have to make a speech.

"We have had," he writes on February 14, "a huge
dinner-party as usual again to-day — 12.45-3 P.M. ! — more
wearisome than one could believe possible, with about
eight courses and a great deal too much to drink, and
a quantity of tiresome people.'^ I beguiled it by doing
conjuring tricks to [my neighbours] Scotch and Irish
[respectively], and asking a lot of riddles about two trains,
and 'that man's father is my father's son.' And I had
positively to write out the whole thing and draw a
portrait in a gilt frame before the Irishman could see it."

Whenever an English personage of importance visited
Rome, he, with " swarms of doubtful counts " (Hugh,
like Sir Nevill Fanning, could not take foreign titles
seriously), had to be entertained at these pontifical
repasts.

The heavy ecclesiastical hospitalities prolonged them-
selves, culminating in the " horrible banquet " of his
ordination day, when he had, during the much health-
drinking, " to look down his nose a good deal."

To Benson, accustomed to his " proper English break-
fast," and, above all, to no siesta after the stupefying
meal of midday, these feastings were, of course, excep-
tionally disconcerting. What with these, and a little
later his constant dinners and lunches with his friends,
he found himself, ruefully, to have eaten more at Rome
than in any one year of his English life. . . . Lent, how-
ever, took its revenge. Long ago he had written to a
friend, from Mirfield, that he hated Lent, and that Easter
seemed an impossible dream. To him, too, he confesses
that at Rome, in Lent, he goes very cold and hungry
and half asleep.

28o ROBERT HUGH BENSON

At once, and naturally, he made off to see the Pope.

Nov. 7.1

. . . To-day I have interviewed an Archbishop and seen
the Pope !

We went this afternoon to one of the courtyards

(Mr. and I) of the Vatican, by ticket — a huge

place, crammed with a garlicky crowd, and all the roofs
and windows filled.^ A huge red canopy was at the
wall at the end, with Swiss halberdiers, all on a platform,
and a blaring band below. . . . He was half an hour
late. At last we saw halberds going along behind, in
the cloister ; and the crowd began to sway and roar,
and a woman fainted next to me. And then he came
on, all in white, bowing and smiling, and the people
bellowing " Evviva," and so on. And then he sat down
and put on a large red hat ; and all his Court, in
purple and red, standing round ; and a choir sang two
odes (?).

And then, at last, he stood up and preached for
about ten minutes, in a mellow voice, very strong, with
a few beautiful gestures, spreading his hands out. And
then, after he had intoned a versicle and response, he
gave the Apostolic benediction ; and everybody crossed
themselves and roared out Amen. Then somebody put
on him his hat again, and an immense scarlet cloak ;
and the effect of colour was quite extraordinary ; and
the people howled with delight. Then he walked very
slowly round the edge of the platform, blessing and
waving his hand and beaming; he was very much flushed
with preaching ; and then, at last, he went back. It was
glorious. Every tongue and nation was there — Germans
and English and French. . . ! ! Lor !

I am going probably to get an audience with the
Pope in a few days, in the general English pilgrimage ;
and shall get presented to him. It is a vast affair ; and
the Archbishop told me too to get introduced by a bishop
to a private audience. So I shall keep my eyes
open. . . .

^ So dated. But from the ticket the date appears to have been the 8th ;
the hour was 3 p.m.

* *' Of course," he wrote to P'ather C Bickersteth, " I thought of the quarry."

IN ROME 281

I will add at once his narration of other papal and,
so to say, semi-papal interviews he had during this stay
in Rome.

November 15.

. . . On Tuesday we went to congratulate Merry del
Val on his Cardinalate. Gorgeous rooms ! the Borgia
apartments in the Vatican. Alexander VI lived there ;
and Julius II was the last inhabitant. We went in through
the Swiss Guard and immense Gendarmes ; a secretary
in dress clothes, at ii a.m., took our names down. And
then we went in. He was cordial and nice. He said
he had read Papa's life with great interest ; and then
told me to tell him at any time if there was anything
he could do for me, as he is Secretary of State, and a
number of other things ; I imagine there will be a few
things by and by. (It is rather pleasing etiquette that
in the Vatican people kneel to nobody except the Pope.)

Then on Thursday [Nov. 12] we went to the Sala
Ducale to see the Pope and Cardinals go by to a
Consistory. The Pope walked, instead of being carried ;
and was not so impressive as on Sunday ; he looked
tired and miserable, in an enormous mitre glittering all
over with diamonds, and a cope. And there was no
music ! Even a court band would have improved it.

Again on November 29 he writes :

We all went on Sunday [Nov. 24, at 3.30 p.m.] with the
English pilgrims to an audience at the Vatican ; but it was
nothing much — the Pope just passed along, giving his
hand to be kissed by each person in turn ; and that was
about all. He obviously hates functions, and looked bored
and depressed. He dislikes being Pope, I believe, quite
inexpressibly.

He did not obtain the privilege coveted by all Catholic
pilgrims, of assisting at the Pope's Mass and receiving Holy
Communion from his hand, till January 31, 1904, at 7.15 A.M.

January 30.

. . . Earlier in the week we went to call on Mgr.
Bisletti, the Pope's secretary, to give in our names for

282 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

the Mass ; he lives in large rooms entirely furnished in
red damask and gold, and is a little man, like a fox-terrier,
with his head on one side, in purple silk.

The permission came late on January 29, in "a large
white envelope, fastened with a scarlet wafer, like a letter
on the stage,"

On January 31, therefore :

We went to the Vatican, up staircases and through
marble and crimson and tapestry rooms, into a crimson
damask room with two folding doors at the end, wide open,
and an altar all gold and candles beyond. Then suddenly
the Pope appeared, ruddy-brown face, white cassock and
cap, and gave his blessing in the doorway, then vested at
the altar, with three officials helping him ; in a purple
jewelled chasuble. . . . He said Mass at a moderate pace
and voice, with a rather pathetic intonation ; and gave us
all Communion at the altar-rail at the end ; then he unvested
and knelt during another Mass said by a chaplain ; then
gave us his blessing silently and disappeared. And that
is all one can say ; but it left an extraordinary sense of
simplicity and humility ; there was not the suspicion
of an air of a great prelate, except in his supreme
naturalness.

Pope Pius X used not to make the dazzling impression
on his visitors which Leo XIII produced. Pope Leo's
smile enveloped you like a flame, his gestures lashed the
dullest into alert attention, and his glances were like
electric shocks. Pius X resembled Pio Nono not only in
feature, as his portraits prove, but in a certain bonhomie,
so we are told, and a twinkle of humour, when he was not
too tired, which charmed many whom Leo's vitality
terrified. But beyond all else, I think it was the supreme
recoUectedness of Pius X which remained in one's memory ;
his eyes looked at you often from an immense distance ;
and his voice was not without its note of awe even when
he laughed, and even when he asked the most practical

IN ROME 283

questions about, shall I say, food, or studies, or workmen's
clubs, or Oxford. This was for something in that quality
of Greatness Hugh diagnosed in him: "To-morrow," he
wrote on Low Sunday to his mother, " will be splendid,
when the Pope says Mass in St. Peter's. But he is Large
too — and likes proper things and people ; and proper
music, and not MUCK ; and the salvation of souls, and
children."

The note of " Largeness " remained with him.

" It was overwhelming!" he wrote.^ " The whole church
was cobbled with heads, and over that pavement came the
huge canopy, with the great jewelled figure below it, and
the solemn fans waving behind. That was one of the
keenest moments. In front came an almost endless row
of mitres moving along. Then the plain-song was like
one enormous deliberate voice talking, and every now and
then shouting, in that enormous place. And then, of
course, the final great moment was the Elevation, in dead
silence, and only broken by the silver trumpets exulting
up in the dome. It gave one an extraordinary sense of
consummation — the vision of Christ offering Christ, in the
very centre of the world, with representatives of the whole
Christian world there, and the angels blowing their trumpets
overhead. One felt as if everything that was important or
real was focused there . . . other things seem very small
after that." 2

He had no more audiences from the Pope, I think, until
just before his departure from Rome, when he armed
himself with many blessings, and obtained the Pope's

* spiritual Letters, p. 72.

* He does not mention a delightful and characteristic incident. Pius X
disliked the fluttered handkerchiefs and cheers for the Pope-king which gave
Leo XIII such keen satisfaction. He had ordered that there should be nothing
of the sort. None the less, during a certain ceremony, the suppressed enthusiasm
of the crowd was beginning to break out at certain points. Benson leapt passion-
ately on to his bench, and with waving arms and energetic hushing enforced
silence so very authoritatively, that the Who is he ? eagerly asked by all around,
sufficiently substituted a new centre of disturbance.

284 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

white silk skull-cap/ according to custom, offering an
exactly similar one in exchange. He obtained a special
blessing for " Father Benson's family and nurse, and three
books," and also permission to say Mass in his mother's
house. This took place on June 24th.

However, for a mind constituted as his was, the Pope's
presence was always present as a kind of sustained pedal
note in the changing harmonies of Rome. Wherever you
are, on the Quirinal as on the Palatine, in the Corso and
Trastevere, it is quite impossible to forget him. He foresaw
that Catholicism would become ever " more papalistic and
more liberal." Such, indeed, was his own career. The
Pope haunted him, and it is in his two strange books, Lord
of the World and The Dawn of All, that he gives full play
to his homage to the " Christ on Earth," as St. Catherine
of Siena so boldly used to call Christ's Vicar. In The
Lord of the World, Pius X is most directly recalled. He
is John XXIV, the Papa Angelicus who "had cared, it
appeared, nothing whatever for the world's opinion ; his
policy, so far as it could be called one, consisted in a very
simple thing ; he had declared in epistle after epistle
that the object of the Church was to do glory to God by
producing supernatural virtues in man, and that nothing
at all was of any significance or importance except in so
far as it effected this object." However, this John XXIV
was as vigorous an organiser as ever was Pope Pius,
whose reforming activity so much disconcerted his con-
temporaries. Pius X made a very strong hand felt
throughout the world of seminaries, of ecclesiastical law,
of music and of art, of criticism, of journalism, of social
work ; though it was in his supreme resolve to " recapi-
tulate all things into Christ," his campaign against modern-

* It is now in a glass case in ihe middle of the Hare Street library mantelpiece.

IN ROME 2?5

ism, and his decrees about Communion, that he struck that
great blow for the supernatural which Benson more quaintly
imaged forth by the transformation of Rome by Papa
Angelicus into a mediaeval city. However, Pope John was,
in Benson's mind, the summing-up, no less, of all the Visible
Church. His face, with its hawk's eyes, its clear-cut, yet
passionate lips, its firm chin, its generous and sweet poise,
" between defiance and humility," and its strange youthful-
ness, was indistinguishable from a " composite photo " of
representative priests, when exhibited to laughing crowds
at music-halls. In the novel, of course, Julian Felsenburgh,
the Antichrist, is not so much an incarnation of Satan, as
the adequate representative of humanwise perfect Man,
called, therefore, by the New Thought, divine. But this
Pope was his absolute and final contrast, inasmuch as he
on his side summed up, representatively, the Church, the
body of the Incarnate God. "One of the two, John and
Julian, was the Vicar, and the other, the Ape, of God."
"The two cities of Augustine lay for him to choose." In
their measure, too, the kings and emperors, "the lonely
survivors of that strange company of persons who, till half
a century ago, had reigned as God's temporal Vicegerents
with the consent of their subjects," proclaimed the in-
sufficiency of human sanction and authority. It would be
well, if there were space here, to quote the very gorgeous
pages in which Benson describes the procession of their
monstrous coaches, with their eight horses, " the white of
France and Spain, the black of Germany, Italy, and Russia,
and the cream-coloured of England." Lions, leopards, and
eagles guarded the royal crown upon the roof of each ; up
scarlet carpets, between rows of glimmering halberds, the
tremendous Royalties passed, until they sat, in splendid
isolation, beneath great baldachins, on whose damask

286 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

surfaces " burned gigantic coats supported by beasts and
topped by crowns." The papal procession entered :
trumpets cried aloud, and the tens of thousands, crowding
the basilica, roared acclamation to the Supreme Pontiff.

Far ahead, seeming to cleave its way through the surg-
ing heads, like the poop of an ancient ship, moved the
canopy beneath which sat the Lord of the World ; and
between him and the priests, as if it were the wake of that
same ship, swayed the gorgeous procession — protonotaries
apostolic, generals of religious orders, and the rest — making
its w^ay along with white, gold, scarlet, and silver foam
between the living banks on either side. Overhead hung
the splendid barrel of the roof, and far in front the haven
of God's altar reared its monstrous pillars, beneath which
burned the seven yellow stars that were the harbour lights
of sanctity. It was an astonishing sight, but too vast and
bewildering to do anything but oppress the observers with
a consciousness of their own futility. The enormous
enclosed air, the giant statues, the dim and distant roofs,
the indescribable concert of sound — of the movement of
feet, the murmur of ten thousand voices, the peal of organs
like the crying of gnats, the thin celestial music — the faint,
suggestive smell of incense and men and bruised may and
myrtle ; and, supreme above all, the vibrant atmosphere of
human emotion, shot with supernatural aspiration, as the
Hope of the World, the holder of the Divine Viceroyalty,
passed on his way to stand between God and man.

The Pope stood at the altar ; to him, driven from their
thrones, came the kings and emperors to minister at the
Mass. They poured water, they placed cushions, they bore
his train. Towering above the world was the figure of
Christ's Vicar, until, the miracle being accomplished, the
Christ himself was there, and Pope and kings bowed equally
before their Lord.^

* When Percy Franklin himself is Pope, the allegory us completed, but the
scene and incidents are no longer drawn from Benson's experience of Rome.
They stand separate and on their own merits, and I will speak of them when
The Ijtrdofthe Wctrldmmx Ijc alluded to.

IN ROME 287

Benson's love for pageantry reveals itself again in the
Dawn of All, where the Pope, Temporal Ruler of all Italy,
and practically acknowledged by the whole world as its
spiritual lord, rides triumphant across Rome. The same
" stage-properties," if I may call them so, repeat them-
selves ; the self-same adjectives are used. The out-of-door
procession replaces the progress through St. Peter's ; the
blessing from the balcony is substituted for the Mass. A
tremendous reception, glittering and noisy, displays the
Vatican, from an exactly opposite point of view, as a focus
of power. But Benson is insisting on a subtly differentiated
doctrine. In both novels the Pope stands for spirit acting
through the flesh ; but in the first the emphasis is on the
spirit ; in the second on its incarnational vehicle, so to say.
The Pope is the average man ; he is a safe financier ; he
has never faced a crisis, but is sound at business. . . . He
offers to the world that heavily human aspect which enabled
Benson, in anglicising Giuseppe Sarto's surname, delibe-
rately to speak of Pius X as Bishop Taylor. This jars on
perhaps a majority of hearers. But why deny the fact ?
It is a supreme illustration of his ruthless recognition that
that in which the spirit incarnates itself is flesh and nothing
else. It is utterly of a piece with his displeasing portrait-
ures of priests, his relentless ridicule of ecclesiastical art
and jargon and mannerism. It would be false wholly, 1
will not say to his exterior attitude, but to something very
deep-set in him indeed, were it to be disguised that in his
sacramental construing of all life, he deliberately and rather
brutally insisted on the human coefficient throughout.
Observe, too, that in the later novel the balance is redressed
with skill, almost with ingenuity. The Monsignor, inclined
to think this Catholicism too worldly, leaves the reception,
loses his way in the labyrinthine Vatican, pushes open an

288 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

unguarded door, and surprises the Pope at confession to a
Franciscan friar. He was overwhelmed.

. . . He had seen nothing remarkable in itself — the
Pope at confession. And yet in some manner, beyond the
fact that he had groped his way, all unknowing, to the
Pope's private apartments, and at such a moment, the
dramatic contrast between the glare and noise of the recep-
tion outside, itself the climax of a series of brilliant external
splendours, and the silent, half-lighted chapel where the
Lord of all kneeled to confess his sins, caused a surprising
disturbance in his soul.

Up to now he had been introduced step by step into a
new set of experiences, Christian indeed, yet amazingly
worldly in their aspect ; he had begun to learn that religion
could transform the outer world, and affect and use for its
own purposes all the pomps and glories of outward exist-
ence ; he had begun to realise that there was nothing alien
to God, no line of division between the Creator and the
creature ; and now, in one instant, he had been brought
face to face again with inner realities, and had seen, as it
were, a glimpse of the secret core of all the splendour.
The Pope, attended by princes, the Pope on his knees
before a bare-footed friar ; these were the two magnetic
points between which blazed religion.

Thus then the spiritual element is re-introduced, and
the humiliation of the flesh is only the more sharply
emphasized.

A series of religious functions makes Rome unique
among the world's modern capitals.

From the outset Benson assists, much puzzled how to

judge them, at these displays which alternately inspire and

disconcert him.

San Silvestro in Capite,

November 20.

I am beginning this letter earlier this week, as there will
be a rush on Sunday, I expect, as I am going off to St. Cal-
lixtus's Catacomb for Mass, as it is St. Cecilia's Day.
(Privately I am not quite sure of the connection, but daren't
ask. I am nearly sure that her body was found there.) . . .

IN ROME 289

On the i8th I went to Vespers and the exhibition of
rehcs in S. Peter's, as it was the dedication festival. This
last ceremony was immensely impressive. Vespers were
booming away in a chapel, and had been for about an
hour ; and the church was getting darker and darker.
There were no lights except on the altars all round, and
they only looked like tiny sparks ; and the confession and
papal altar was twinkling like a Christmas tree ; but it was
so dark in the top of the nave that one could not recognise
faces. Then suddenly the bells jangled loud ; a procession
with lights and a bishop with a cope and mitre, and Ram-
polla in scarlet, came out of the chapel with a great crowd
following ; the lights went up everywhere simultaneously,
everybody went on their knees, and right up in a gallery in
the dome, where eight huge candles were burning, a man
appeared, a little figure in white, with a reliquary, which he
waved up and down as he walked to and fro. First he
showed the Lance, then the True Cross, then the handker-
chief of St. Veronica. Then he disappeared, everybody got
up and went away, and it was over.

But I don't really like functions ; I wish I did, because
it is the chief occupation of everyone to go to them.
Yesterday, as I had a Httle cold, I stayed indoors all day
and worked in the library, and wrote letters and saw no-
body, and loved it.

On Sunday he adds :

Yesterday I went to St. Cecilia's Church ! My word ! It
was her eve. The church was crammed; and a magnificent
choir was singing Vespers and " In Organis Cantantibus."
Below the High Altar is her body : the tomb blazing with
lights, and a crowd fighting to get near it ; the crypt of
the church is her house, with all the mosaics left that she
trod upon. She was half-beheaded, you know, and lived
three days, and then "fell asleep"; and her body was
found in the catacomb, her head on her hand, lying on
her side, as if in a natural deep sleep. The stone where it
was found forms an altar-slab in the crypt ; and people
were kneeling there and kissing it and laying their rosaries
on it to-day ; while that glorious choir was pealing away
overhead. My word ! ! The Communion of Saints means
something here ; there were bishops, and peasants, and
bald-headed men, and children all crowding everywhere ;
I T

290 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

every chair taken ; hundreds standing, and walking, and
kneeling as they liked. Really this religion is alive.

But more extraordinary than anything was Mass this
morning in St. Callixtus's Catacomb, sixty feet down ; High
Mass in the chapel where her body was found, lovely four-
part unaccompanied Palestrinian music, with plain-song ;
a crowd crammed along the passages of the catacombs ;
the whole place full of red and white chrysanthemums and
altars with hundreds of candles. One went straight back
1800 years, when the same words and language were used
in the same place. It has touched me far more than any-
thing in Rome.

He took the habit of attending Mass at certain cata-
combs on the patronal day of their chief martyr, and would
send home box-leaves from their decoration. The spell of
the catacombs never diminished for him, and you will
find that in Initiation the scene in the catacombs is more
touched with genuine emotion than almost any other.

He participates next week in a Cardinal's Mass, and a
colossal procession of the Blessed Sacrament in St. John
Lateran, and, perhaps because the unaccompanied choir
sang Palestrina exquisitely, ends with the outcry, which
will grow frequent, " It was a gorgeous ceremony."

On December 19 he and a friend attended an Ordina-
tion, also at the Lateran, the late Archbishop Stonor's kind-
ness having obtained seats for them. On their arrival at
8.35 A.M. the ceremony had "well begun," and was not
finished at 12. "There is a tremendous moment when
the choir is filled with men in albs, flat on their faces,
without stirring. This goes on for about ten minutes, as
the Litany of the Saints is sung. Tremendous ! All the
names of the Archangels and Saints one after another,
followed by * Ora pro nobis,' until you are aware that the
entire Court of Heaven is assisting. . . ."

In Rome, it may not generally be known, many other

IN ROME 291

rites are observed besides the Roman, especially about the
time of the Epiphany, which was from the outset the
Eastern Christmas. Benson did not appreciate them.
"There has been," he wrote on January 10,

... a round of Oriental rites here, with choirs howling
like Dervishes, and tinkling long poles with bells on them,
and beating tom-toms ; and that is about all. I suppose
it would be very interesting if one knew what it was all
about ; but, as it is, it is only rather interesting.

He returned with satisfaction to popular and really
Roman ceremonies.

Thus at Ara Cceli, on the last day of the Epiphany
Octave, an " amazing " Te Deum was

sung by the choir and bellowed by the congregation in
alternate verses ; a Bishop made a sermon, holding the
Bambino in his left arm, from the altar-steps, to a packed
crowd, who rushed up to kiss its silver foot after. It was
really most beautiful and impressive.

The popular singing of Te Deums always impressed
him. On the 19th of March, Feast of St. Joseph, and the
Pope's name-day, he mingled with the twenty thousand
worshippers who thronged St. Peter's, and with whom,
when " they ROARED the Te Deum," he, not knowing the
words, made the " loud buzzing sound " already told of.
But it was with Holy Week that the real " whirl of cere-
monies" began. The fifty thousand at St. Peter's for
Thursday Tenebrae, the hundred thousand who visited
San Silvestro's Altar of Repose on that same day, impress
him, but

best of all, and one of the few ceremonies at which
there was sufficient peace to pray, was at S. Teodoro's on
Good Friday morning : a little round reddish church, on
the foot of the Palatine, just below the Caesars' palaces.
It was striking to hear there, " If thou let this Man go, thou
art not Caesar's friend," and "Whosoever maketh himself

292 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

king speaketh against Caesar ! " There was a choir there,
a mediaeval Guild, entirely of Roman nobles, in sackcloth
and ropes and hoods, who kissed the crucifix barefooted
at the " Creeping to the Cross." And there was only a
small congregation, and I had a chair, which is a luxury
at great functions.^

Then, [he goes on,] it was heavenly this morning at
St. John Lateran — I got there at seven, and met carts drawn
by oxen and piled with olive-branches coming in from
the country. The first main ceremony was the blessing
of the fire by the Cardinal Vicar ; this was done in the
transept ; then one of three candles on a pole all wreathed
with roses was lighted, then another a few steps farther
on, and then the third ; and at each the deacon in white
sang out " Lumen Christi," and everyone roared " Deo
Gratias."

Then he sang the "Exultet" — such a song! — from a
pulpit, and lighted the huge Paschal Candle in the middle,
and went on with " Sursum Corda." . . . Then I rushed
out about nine, and got coffee at a shop, and ran back to
the Baptistery, which was all strewn with myrtle and
flowers ; then the procession came in singing " Like as the
hart desireth the water-brooks," and the water was blessed
and a Jew-child baptized. It was glorious ; and then the
procession came out again across the square and back to
the church ; and Mass began in white vestments ; then
the climax came at the " Gloria in Excelsis." The Cardinal
put on an enormous gold mitre and bellowed the first words,
then the organ and ALL the bells roared and jangled for
the first time in a sort of frenzied voluntary ; and then the
choir began ; and when I came out, as it was late, all the
bells in Rome were ringing — MY GOODNESS ME ! What
a religion it is ! You feel that the entire creation has part
in it, and that nothing is common or unclean after Chris-
tianity has taken it in charge.

Easter by Easter his soul will exult in tune with this
resurrection-hymn, and to it he consecrates some of the
most sweet and childlike of the pages in his Papers of a
Pariah. On Holy Saturday he watches the blessing of

* A small sketch of a penitent follows. It has its vitality: the bare toes
are wisely allowed to overlap the margin. Hands and feet are the last detail
an untrained pencil is willing to attempt.

IN ROME 293

clear fire and water, of holy gums and spices, and of
paschal wax. The " Exultet " was intoned :

It was a song such as none but a Christian could
ever sing. It soared, dropped, quavered, leapt again,
laughed, danced, rippled, sank, leapt once more, on and
on, untiring and undismayed, like a stream running clear
to the sea. Angels, earth, trumpets, Mother Church, all
nations and all peoples sang in its singing. And I, in my
stiff pew, smiled all over my face with sheer joy and love.

He piles up quaint appreciations and childlike specula-
tions : the " wealth of divine contradiction, delirious para-
dox, and childlike wisdom" of this master-song enchant him.

I wonder if anyone will think me irreverent in my
thoughts ? They will be wrong if they do, for I am as
sure as I can be that this is more or less what the Catholic
Church meant me to think. She wished me to be as
happy as a child — happy because Jesus Christ was risen,
and because she was happy . . . God who has made the
sun and the sea, who shines and rains upon just and unjust
alike, will not be angry with me because I loved to see
how He can deal with plain things — how He can make
water holy as well as beautiful, and fire to lighten souls as
i well as eyes. . . .

Noticeable, then, as an element in these great ecclesi-
astical pageantries, was the enthusiastic devotion of the
people. The spectacle of masses of men and women not
only joining with passion and intelligence in a superb
ritual, but wanting that ritual, and finding it in their blood,
and coming to it as to an enthralling beauty ever old
and ever new, was unknown, hitherto, to Benson. It
witnessed to a mode of inner life, to exigencies of worship,
to an incarnate mysticism, with which he was thoroughly
in tune. I have said how, in the Pope, he diagnosed a
supreme example of spiritual power expressing itself
through flesh. An encounter he made within a week or

294 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

two of his arrival impressed him in a similar fashion,
and in letters, right and left, he alludes to it :

November 15.

Yesterday after lecture an old man was pointed out
to me in the garden in a filthy old cassock and hat, and
unshaven, but with one of the most ethereal faces I have
ever seen. There was a group of stolid working-men star-
ing at him ; and Father Vaughan whispered to me that
he was going to be a saint some day. It is one of the
things in Rome to see him say Mass ! and he, of course,
is blankly unconscious of it all. It is so interesting to
see a saint in the making.

In the behaviour of the people, especially in their rela-
tion to the Blessed Sacrament, he finds the same spirit
expressing itself.

"The two pivots," he exclaims, "on which all life
turns, are Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, and His
people." And again and again he laments that people
who come to Rome permit themselves to see only the
wrong things. " They don't know how to find the people
at their prayers."

November 7.

The religion here is astonishing. Crowds of people
here at every Mass and Benediction. Last night in the
Redemptorist church there was some splendid popular
singing, like a Mission. And insects abounded.

And a week later he wrote to Miss Kyle :

November 14.

A couple of days ago in this church here, in about three
minutes, the following things happened within a yard of
me. First a man came, knelt before " Our Lady Hope of
England," crossed himself with oil from her lamp ; another
came, knelt, said the prayer for England, kissed the glass
in which it was framed, and went away. Then I moved to
the Pieta ; one man was already kneeling there, and in a
moment more came another, moaning out prayers aloud
as he came, knelt, stretched out his rosary towards the
images with hands outstretched, got up, reached towards

IN ROME 295

the railing, touched Our Lady's foot, kissed his hand that
had touched it, and went away.

And that kind of thing is going on all day, everywhere.

"In the evening," he elsewhere writes,^ after an. almost
textual reproduction of the above, " I went to the gallery,
where I was alone. Benediction was going on below ;
nothing to attract ; hideous music, the continued creaking
and groaning of chairs, no organ or choir, and a crowd of
seventy or eighty people (just an ordinary week-night), and
a breathless, rapt silence at the moment itself. The atmos-
phere of faith and worship was overwhelming, especially as
it was so singularly unattractive from every physical point of
view. . . . Yet [there was] this crowd, scattered in a great
disorderly group, all adormg That which was in the mon-
strance in the little dim side-chapel. And that goes on
night after night all the year round, and this church is not
exceptional at all. . . . The devotion of the people is beyond
all description, especially, I really think, of the men, who
form quite half, if not more, of all the mid-day congre-
gations.

" Everyone gets his own chair and kneels, and plants it
exactly where he likes, at any angle, pointed towards any
Mass that he likes. ... I was watching a well-dressed man
this morning, with no book, but whose lips were moving
quite incessantly; and another, a rough- haired boy from
the country, absolutely rapt and motionless, kneeling on
the stones, with his face hidden for, I should think, half an
hour. The sense of worship is beyond anything I have
ever dreamt of out of heaven." ^

It was, of course, at the Exposition of the Blessed Sac-
rament that these displays of popular yet intimate devotion
reached their most poignant manifestations. On March
26 the Quarant' Ore was proceeding at San Silvestro.

It is most moving. I looked into the church at mid-
night, last night, from the grating, and there were four
men kneeling and praying, and the altar was blazing with
candles, and great banks of white flowers on each side
running down the flight of steps into the church. The

^ spiritual Letters, p. 53. - Ibid., p. 64.

296 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Queen is there now, with her ladies on each side. She has
sent most of the flowers too. There is always at least one
church all the year round in Rome where it goes on, and
it is always well filled all day. It is one of the most over-
whelming things in the whole place. Men take the night
watches, of four hours each — 10-2, 2-6.

A similar centre of devotion was San Claudio, close by.
He refers to it so often that, at the risk of being tedious, I
shall quote from the letter to Father G. W. Hart of
November 1 1 :

And now for the real thing. The religion is something
surprising. You cannot find a church that is not continu-
ally alive with people of every sort and class, all mixed.
It is almost impossible to select, but two stand out in
one's mind : (i) the Redemptorists ^ [sketch] ; on Satur-
day evening we went there for shriving ; the church was
full, organ booming a litany, people and priests roaring it ;
lights blazing, " Our Lady of Perpetual Succour " beaming
in a corona of candles over the high altar, and incense
reeking. At the moment of benediction the organ blared
out, and the bells began to peal feverishly ; I wept ; there
was indescribable melody and light. (2) St. Claud — Per-
petual Exposition goes on here. The Blessed Sacrament
stands continually with a great ermine robe behind it 2
[sketch], and a crown over it, and candles below, with men
in cottas kneeling before it, and the body of the church
humming with prayer. The devotion of the people is quite
beyond describing. I don't know what people mean when
they say that the worship of Our Lady is thought more of
than of the Blessed Sacrament. There is nothing resemb-
ling it. There is perpetual and fervent enthusiasm. . . .

As somebody said, papists out here are like spoilt
children of God, as entirely at home as in their own houses.
I have watched children during Mass sitting flat in the
middle of an inlaid floor, treating it as a kind of castle, and
tracing its foundations with filthy fingers. But the prayers
of them and the people, when they set themselves to it, are

^ He finds the Redemptorists' work incomparably efficacious, but, curiously
enough, never (that I know of) showed signs of wanting to join their Company.
^ The coronation robe of Napoleon I.

IN ROME 297

simply indescribable. They fetch a chair, making it squeak
all across the floor ; plant it where they like, have a word
or two with a friend, fumble about for beads, then kneel
down solid on the stone floor, and remain entirely motion-
less for half an hour. I have watched a big boy here once
or twice, a Yahoo with matted hair, in a kind of yellow
suit, dirty beyond description, absolutely motionless, kneel-
ing for half an hour before the Blessed Sacrament. My
goodness me ! You come into a church at any hour you
like, and there are at least half a dozen people, men and
women equally, sitting in the very middle of the magnifi-
cent marble floor, with their hands before them, looking,
and looking, and looking at the tabernacle. And you go
out half an hour later, after wandering round, and there
they are still.

Well, I could go on for ever, but I won't. But the
reality of it all is beyond all description.

On November 20, he wrote to Mrs. Benson that while
he is getting lower and lower at the thoughts of the certain
refusal, by his prospective publishers, of his book By What
Authority ? he is already devising the plot of another one,
of Charles II's period. I reserve, for the moment, the
many references to this book, and I will indicate the kind
of religious preoccupations which made a mental back-
ground for a life in which such ceremonies as I have
described stand more visibly in relief.

In November, his days still were cursed with fatigue
and boredom within, and thunder and rain without — " quite
like an English June."

Sunday, November 28.

... I dream of Horsted Keynes almost every night,
and cannot describe how much I want to be there ; I hate
towns and " abroad." . . .

My " wobblers " are dropping in : two more since I
wrote have written to say that they know now how it is
going to end ; and I am putting one in connection with a
priest. But they are suffering dreadfully, and nobody
seems to realise that.

298 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

By December 6 the flatness of life has been diversified
by a domestic ceremony, the return to San Silvestro of the
head of St. John Baptist from the Vatican.

December 6.

. . . The chief thing is the return of St. John the
Baptist's head to this church from the Vatican after being
away for thirty-three years. One can't say whether one
"beHeves" it to be the head or not — one's imagination
cannot grasp what it means ; one can only paw it. But
here it is ; brown and shrivelled and without the lower jaw ;
and its record goes back I don't know how many centuries.
It is in a gorgeous reliquary, with pearls and amethysts,
altogether about 7 feet high. We met it at the door with
torches and cottas and pealing bells ; it came in a waggon
drawn by mules. . . .

This attitude towards relics and this psychological
quality of belief in their authenticity is interestingly alluded
to. Before now, he had asserted, after Newman, that he
believed, but did not know that he believed. So here, in
minor affairs, he could not be sure of his spiritual state.
Probably it was intermediate. He certainly believed that
St. Paul's body " without a shadow of doubt " lay beneath
his altar at San Paolo fuori le Mura, and that St. Peter's
was under the Vatican basilica. He as certainly did not
believe in the uncanny experiences he liked to admit as
thrills, now as much as ever. A singular passage occurs
in a letter written on Low Sunday :

I went to see a church yesterday that you would loathe ;
but I have never seen such extraordinary things in my
life — a collection of shirts and habits and tables and
books and things on which Souls from Purgatory had
laid their hands ! — and left dreadful marks ; and an
extraordinary face that appeared on the wall in the church
itself eight years ago, at the end of a series of devotions
for the Souls in Purgatory — a really wonderful face of
sorrow and pain and joy; it is there to this day — I will
tell you all about it when we meet. I know it all sounds

IN ROME 299

very unconvincing and materialistic, and that was exactly
what I thought till I saw them all. But they are simply
astounding.

He was in all this, as usual, two persons ; aloof critic,
and schoolboy eager for thrills.

Thus, a little later on, from Naples, he will gleefully
write :

This flat is haunted ; I will tell you about it sometime ;
I had an awful night, I daresay subjective ; and was
awakened twice by a smashing blow on the door. It was
really rather a blessed moment to hear at last the bells of
the goats and cows going to pasture, and the cocks crow-
ing.

His mother played up gallantly, and wrote in reply :

. . . Mr. L told us yesterday of a haunt in the

rooms he had at Cambridge a week ago — when screams
came from the washstand during the night, twice. He said
the first scream awoke him, and he "lay awake the whole
of the second scream ! " but nothing happened. ^^ Tell
me more about your haunted room at Naples.

He answered :

My "haunt" at Naples was of two violent blows in the
night which awakened me — (on my door) — but this was
after I had been told that a phantom cat had been seen by
Mr. Spender, that his brother, who is a seer, had been in
great terror of a woman whom he knew instinctively was
haunting the place ; and that a family had previously left
the rooms " because Aunt saw things." „

Parallel with this he can write :

I have also met a number of psychical people — Pro-
testants, and convinced ones — of no particular denomina-
tion. Only one of them will do at all — all the rest are
simply credulous, and get cross if one suggests at ail that
other explanations may possibly account for their little
boshy things.

And he still takes a purely objective interest in his

300 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

dreams ; and records them with meticulous care. I select
one example. He wrote on February 27 :

A good dream last night : that the Archbishop had put
a marble flight of steps, with a carpet down the centre,
instead of the wooden staircase that joins the corridors :
and that on each side of the carpet, like an advertisement
at Earl's Court, the name of a book or person that he or
E. had found "helpful." [A sketch follows.] The only
name I can remember was that of a book called A Rose of
Dawn}-

I thought it rather ingenious and nice : it made going
upstairs really interesting, and started innumerable trains
of thought ; and I remember coming downstairs back-
wards in order to reflect.

Meanwhile his spirits were rising, and in his religious
life the pressure was removing itself. " May I say some-
thing ? " he writes on December 6 :

. . . The deadness which has been on me without a
break since Easter, has gone at last — only a day or two
ago, suddenly. It's a blessing. And I know myself well
enough to know that it won't come back for the present.
Best love to everyone — especially Beth.^

^ Had he been reading Tennyson's Vision of Sin ?

^ How communicative, in one sense, his letters were felt to be, I judge
from the following extract, written when he was still depressed and bewildered.
His mother on her side wrote to him an admirable series of letters describing
the outward events of the life which continued, though he had left it, in England ;
her reflections, too, on persons and incidents she generously passed on. Hugh
still, if I dare surmise this, was too preoccupied in assimilating new impressions,
to be conscious of his or others' most truly personal lives.

" December 3.

"I think I do understand about your life," Mrs. Benson wrote, "and you
give so many pictures I can see it all — I wish it was more interesting ; but I still
think it is good for you on the whole — to have that acquaintance with the centre
of things which you don't get anywhere else. I think you are very generous
about the ' Seminary spirit,' and, of course, I am glad you agree with me.

" Beth is frightfully pleased to hear how much you eat and drink, and beams
over your letters, and the ' especially Beth.' "

She herself contributes pen-pictures largely, and laughs over Lord Goschen's
criticisms on ecclesiastical personages in the Anglican Church. " Lord Goschen
is a delicious person to talk to ; he plays the game of Conversation-on-a-week-

IN ROME 301

This rare self-revelation finds itself explained perhaps
by another. To a question of his mother's he once
answered :

There is no inner photograph to give, except that I
am wholly content and satisfied. Granted a " revelation,"
all other forms of propagating it are unthinkable, except
as purely temporary ; I know everything must come back
to Rome some day.

" In Rome," she had written, " on your birthday, and,
so to speak, 'for Roman purposes!' But there is no
sting in it."

He made at this period one of his brief and rather
unlucky "tours of observation" over the field of general
theological and critical interests.

Dec. 6.

Have you heard much about Abb6 Loisy, I wonder ?
He is the French higher critic, and will probably be con-
demned ; and if he is, goodness knows what will happen !
He seems to be the only person who knows about the
Bible at all, in France.

Dec. 10.

" Loisy ! " his mother answered. " O my dear ! But he
out-herods Herod in his higher criticism, I believe. The
who/e Bible is an allegory."

Dec. 17.

" Loisy ! " he writes a little later, in answer to a question.
" Yes. If you have the Pilot, please read the article on him,
by a ' Roman Catholic Correspondent,' in the issue of
December 17. They are my sentiments. Also, remember
that it does not mean that his books are untrue, but only
inopportune, and that people are no more ready for them
than children are ready to be told many perfectly true
facts about the world. ' I have many things to say unto
you, but ye cannot bear them now.' "

" This, of course, is on the supposition that they are true.
This argument is not ' a back way out of difficulty ; ' it is

end better than almost anyone I know. I walked between him and Lord

on Sunday afternoon and listened to Old Cabinet talk and New Cabinet
criticisms. . . ."

302 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

the front door wide open. The Index does NOT state that
the books are untrue, but that they are calculated to pro-
duce an untrue or disproportionate impression."

When it became clear that the Abb6 Loisy was no
more, and perhaps had long ceased to be, a Catholic, he
dropped completely and finally out of Benson's preoccu-
pation. This always happened ; it will be so with Murri,
and with Tyrrell. It will be so with the many upon whom
Hugh Benson passed, at first, a favourable, but mistaken
judgment. They are "condemned"; he drops them with
scorched fingers, and passes quickly on to some other
luminous point, heedless, perhaps, whether it too is to
prove a burning coal rather than a safely guarded lamp.

He stayed in Rome for Christmas, and was delighted
with the celebrations. His window, moreover, a large
one, "six feet by five, I should think," had not once
been closed yet, night or day, except when rain positively
streamed on to the floor.

"It is ideal weather again, sharpish, brilliant sun and
blue sky, windless." The limpid air of Italy is an untiring
marvel for him. " I was in Italy," he writes in the Papers
of a Pariah (p. 95), "where the air is like water, and the
water like wine. Morning by morning I awoke to the
crying of the swifts outside, drawing long icy breaths of
freshness, seeing the netted sunshine strike on the ceiling
from the jug of water on the floor, hearing the rustle of
the leaves below my window. There, in Italy, the morning
struck the key of the day ; the world was alive there, and
as good as God made it, and everything was in His hand."
This crystalline character of the air, this sharpness of im-
pressions, carried out in the wheeling flight of the swifts
and the crisp outline and sound of the evergreens, is what
seems (beside the blue of sky and sea) to stand out best

IN ROME 303

for him, in reminiscence, against the blurred and hesitating
shapes and tints of England.

Meanwhile the churches, within, were growing fearful
and wonderful to his Northern eyes, with red damask,
tinkling chandeliers, and astounding cribs. He delights
in these, partly with the direct sympathy of a child who
loves to see spontaneous self-expression, partly with the
naughty glee of one who feels he is taking all possible
wind out of the sails of Protestant critics. What they
expect him to be shy of and explain away, he exults in.
He visits the Ara Cceli, and finds two "brown friars
making the crib. . . ."

Dec. 20.

It was ... a whole chapel made into the stable, with
shepherds all along the side, life-size and hideous^ and card-
board angels descending ; but it was heavenly, with a
crowd of children running up and down the steps into
it, and being pushed off and jawed and jawing back. And
we saw the " Bambino," covered with rings and bracelets,
and, lor ! — nobody but convinced papists should be allowed
to see that. ... I can imagine nothing that would more
put off an inquirer.

And here I insert his own rubric :

About what I want " private," may I explain my views ?
When I say ^^ absolutely private," I mean nobody. When
I say " private," = Maggie and Lucy and Beth may be told,
but nobody else, and they under promise of secrecy. And
when I don't say anything, but merely abuse papists and
papishing ways, will you use your discretion rather severely ?
You see, I am frank.

The reader, too, will in all discretion evaluate Hugh
Benson's vivid criticisms.

He went to Naples on December 26, and was enchanted
with so new an experience. The rooms, to start with, had

exquisite furniture, all old, damasky and brocady and
gilded, with embroideries and pot-pourri and cabinets

304 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

and little Renaissance temples with Christian and pagan
images, and peacock curtains and tiled floors, and all very
large and breezy, with balconies, and a sheer drop of a
hundred feet into the town, and the bay beyond. It is a
lovely day too — no fires, and all the windows wide open,
and Venetian shutters drawn, and the sun lying in streaks
all over the rugs and tiles. There are books everywhere
too, bound in vellum and brown leather. It is really all
beyond words, lovely.

Neapolitan religion he delighted in, of course, and found
the somewhat sober Roman cult enormously enhanced by
the Southern passion of these children of God and Greece.
He tells everybody about a certain " image of the Blessed
Virgin, in a glass case, dressed in blue silk, and holding a
lace handkerchief in her hand. But the devotion of the
people was extraordinary — audible praying during Com-
munion, and quite remarkable reverence, as well as com-
plete freedom. The priest was perfectly rapt in prayer,
but interrupted himself twice to spit. . . ."

He is enraptured with the town ; not one single British
criticism. Capri lies "like a blue cloud across [the bay],
and Vesuvius, looking as if it was made of purple velvet,
slowly smoking." He visits Pompeii, and his pages bristle
with triple exclamation marks. Vesuvius shows only
through a storm, as it did all those centuries ago. Light-
ning flashes ; the clouds are black ; but the tourist climbs
bravely, and peers into craters, and chokes in sulphur
fumes. He buys a "charming clergyman," a "perfectly
beautiful clergyman, a cardinal in fact, made to be looking
on at a crib, dressed in faded red silk and exquisite lawn,
and eighteen inches high." ^ So, too, are the Neapolitans
" charming " ; the cook begs leave to come and say good-
bye, and kisses his hand. Children kiss it too, in the

^ He is standing now (August 1915) on the library mantelpiece at Hare Street,
and is too lanky for grace, and looks intoxicated.

IN ROME 305

street ; their probable hope of largess does not worry
him. He watches a nun's progress down the road, perfectly
mobbed by the devout crowd eager to salute her. '' And
yet," he says serenely, "the comic man at the Miracle
Play is a drunken priest." Certainly Benson's quality of
humour would have held firm in the Middle Ages. His
eye is fixed on facts — " Your life," one wrote to him, " is
all elvai, and not hoKelv ; so much of civilisation is merely
hoKelv."

He adds :

Yesterday, when I went to Communion, a dirty white cat
was sitting on the altar-rail looking at the communicants,
and on another evening two more cats chased one another
about the sanctuary during Benediction, and were finally
shoved away ; because they yowled so. And yesterday,
during Exposition in the Cathedral, when the whole place
was breathless with prayer, a cat was proceeding alone up
the very middle of the nave.

There was no more irreverence, he quite well saw, in the
behaviour tolerated from these luckless cats than in what
we submit to when bees come buzzing, or draughts flitting,
or sunbeams filtering through that consecrated air.

On his return to Rome he settled down in good earnest
to work at his novel.

Jan. 10.

I go down to the English College library a good deal
now and read up Charles II. It is perfectly fascinating,
and glimpses of a book are slowly dawning ; but I don't
want to petrify anything till I know more history. I went
to see some Jesuits about it, and one of them began, just a
little superciliously, " The book for you to read is — let's see,
what is his name ? he died in the fifties, I think." I said,
" Yes, Lingard ; I have read him." " Oh, well, then you
ought to read one of our Fathers' books — Father Morris."
"Yes, Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers; I have read
it." " Oh-h, well, there is a very interesting, but very big
I U

3o6 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

book by another of our Society — Foley's Records of the
Society of Jesus." "Yes, I know that well."

Then he took me seriously, and was perfectly charming,
and took me all over the place, and to another library, and
helped me to search for books, and told me to come again.
And I giggled stupidly all down the street when I left him.

Besides this, he worked at the Vatican :

Jan. 1 8.

. . . The last three mornings I have torn off to the
Vatican Library ; and the first two were entirely occupied
with red-tape, or, rather, the first time it was shut, " because
it was Thursday." But such a place ! with no red-tape
when you get inside ; you may pull it about, and take
down books, and leave them about, and shove ladders
about, without reproof.

Also, he sends for Evelyn's Diary; Pepys's too, and
finds himself writing diaries in his style.

He began to be impressed, moreover, by pagan Rome.
" Pagan Rome," he writes on January 23, " is simply over-
whelming, and I am going to see a lot more of it." He
begs for a Marius. " I must read it all over again out
here." Marius was, however, long delayed ; and I fancy
his ardour for the pagan relics cooled. To tell the truth,
unless a man's imagination be most fully nourished and
highly reconstructive, the blurred lumps of masonry, thrust-
ing their sudden bricks through the modern pavement, the
lonely columns, and arches half engulfed, the bleached and
desiccated Forum, mean tantalisingly little. An unleashed
imagination is, of course, disastrous. Benson's was neither
reckless nor, on this point, well informed ; what he saw
of ancient Rome, he saw through the eyes only of that
grave Epicurean youth, brooding, like Inglesant, over a
life which he took far from at its face value and (for that
is no sin) most individualistically. Benson never wrote
anything frankly absurd, like Lytton's book, about Pompeii

IN ROME 307

or pagan Rome, but he could have by no means reached
such an admirable approximation to reality as, for example,
*' John Ayscough's " Faustula achieves. This book stands
to the period of the Antonines about as close as By What
Authority does to Elizabethan days ; but its added spice of
modernity points ruthlessly the parallel between collapsing
paganism and the decadence of the English Church, a fact
which has caused much annoyance to sensitive reviewers.
Benson would have loved to use the selfsame theme ; it
was, for him, too elusive ; but he very nearly perceived the
possibility of a novel illustrating the Church's Catholicism
in view of her relation to paganism.

'^ Marius," he wrote on March 13, "has arrived safely,
and I have flown through the first volume. It is extra-
ordinary how out here one feels that all that was good
in the old religions has been taken up and transformed in
this. A great deal is just the same, both of the externals —
the processions, statues, lights, shrines, and so on — and of
the internals — the familiarity with the supernatural, the
sense of God manifesting Himself locally, and of the
saints looking after you in a secondary sort of way. It
is one of the most convincing things I have ever come
across. I feel I know Marius as never before, and that
we should have been able to talk about "our common
faith." And, if I may go on a moment, that is where
Puritanism seems to fail. It has gone on perpetuating
the exclusiveness of early Christianity, which was neces-
sary enough until Christianity was out of danger of being
absorbed, but is wholly harmful now that Christianity
is strong enough to absorb everything else. A divine
religion must include in itself natural religion, or it is
simply a new natural religion itself — one more among the
others. Isn't that the whole difference between sectarian-
ism and Catholicism ? "

Jan. 13.

" I am immensely interested," his sister wrote, " by what
you say of the way in which Roman Catholicism explains
other religions. Of course I see that must be in a sense
true because of the very fact that, on the other hand, the

3o8 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

reproach is that it has amalgamated with paganism and
taken up heathen superstition with itself. There is a truth
that lies between the two, or is rather vindicated by both."

II

It was, then, quite early during his stay at Rome that
Benson conceived the idea of a novel dealing with the
period of Charles II. To collect his references to it will
be interesting, as showing his method of work, and his
consultation with his mother, so close as almost to deserve
the name of collaboration, and in this way it will be found
that many other allusions are explained. Moreover, if we
are to have, in imagination, a true picture of Benson's
mental preoccupations at Rome, we cannot afford to post-
pone these extracts till we mention, in its proper place,
tbe Oddsfishfinio which this Charles II story grew.

Nov. 20.

... I wonder if there is any news of my book [By
What Authority]. Personally I am getting lower and
lower at the thought of it. Of course Isbister won't accept
it ! but I am beginning to wonder whether anybody will.
All the same, I am madly beginning to think about another
— period, Charles II ; hero, a Roman Catholic clergyman
(as I need scarcely say), who goes to Court, nearly joins
the Church of England, and finally becomes a Benedictine.
He is to meet John Inglesant in England, now an old
man. He is grandson of Isabel, and has just seen her
when he was a child, and so on, and so on. Charles II
looms large in it. I really am beginning to have an
affection for him.

Had Benson been able to plan his work a little more
widely, this novel and sanctified Rougon Macquart series
might have formed an exceptionally subtle study in
history and heredity. He continues on January 10 :

Please give me your advice about my new book. My
hero, Nicholas Buxton, a priest, is the grandson of Isabel,

IN ROME 309

who, by the way, did marry Mr. Buxton after all. He has
succeeded, so far as I can find out, to Tremans, and has
no relations. Shall he live at Tremans like the others ;
or shall he have a small house in Kensington, with square
windows and a little paved court with a plane-tree in the
middle, and let Tremans to a papistical lady ? The
advantage of Kensington lies in the fact that he will be
able to drop into Whitehall at all hours ; but, again, I doubt
whether the paved court will be a suitable place for re-
tirement.

If you will let me know, I will tell him, and see what
he thinks himself.

Mrs. Benson answered that the hero was to live '' in
Kensington, not Tremans (except on a visit), and the
paved-tiled court in summer — lovely ; you see it would be
practically in the country, and he could have an oratory
for the winter. Tell him I have seen him there, and
report."

Hugh answered :

I have given your message to Nicholas Buxton, and
he will consider Kensington more than ever with your en-
couragement.

January 23.

What do you think of this for a plot ? Three divisions ;
it begins by a priest leaving a Benedictine house here to
work in England, (i) The first division is his first tempta-
tion, which is to run away when the Oates Plot begins.
He is really afraid of being hanged, but he stops through
it, and ministers to the prisoners. (2) In the country near
West Grinstead he falls in with a girl, Gertrude Maxwell
(a grand-daughter of Hubert and Grace), and in trying
to convert her gets very strongly attached to the Church
of England, its refinement and gentlemanliness, and so on,
and its moderation and quietness and church music ; he
also falls in love with Gertrude, who represents the Church
of England at her best. He goes through an immense
struggle, and wins. (3) He goes up to Court, and works
in Charles II's reunion schemes, and this becomes to him
the most subtle temptation of all, because it seems to be
for God's glory, until he finds out that the methods used

3IO ROBERT HUGH BENSON

are not good, and that it is really worldliness dressed up.
Charles II dies, and James II offers him a post at Court;
but he throws it all up, and goes back to Rome to pray
and work straightforwardly. I think it may work out
rather well, as the temptations go in a steady gradation
of subtlety ; and it gives any amount of opportunity for
background — the Court, country life, &c. What do you
think ?

A week later he has the first two parts " ranged out in
chapters," but finds part three much harder to "put in
order." Charles II, he finds, "made definite proposals
to Rome in 1662, and that the Pope answered ; but his
letter is lost, so I am inventing one, and am making
Charles revive his proposals in 1682, and employ my hero
in them, especially in sounding the Anglican authorities."
He then begs his mother and sister to send him " notes
pictorial, &c.," of " three or four important Anglican
people, especially the two Archbishops, Ken and anyone
else, whom, if possible, I can place in London." During
the next week the book speeds ahead.

Nicholas Buxton at this moment has entered the King's
room. I am furnishing Whitehall, regardless of expense,
with silver-mounted mirrors and bronzes and tapestries,
and dressing Nicholas in a black periwig, with lace and
sword ; and they are all beginning to talk of themselves,
Beth has been accused of witchcraft years ago, and has,
besides, a great grey cat in her garden, and is now looking
after Nicholas's house in Kensington, with Susan and a
man, and has had a door made, quite useless, which she
imagines he will escape by when the constables come . . .
and Isabel Buxton's portrait hangs in Nicholas's study,
and he has a lock of hair of Anthony's that Isabel cut
in the Tower after his death ; and so on. They are all
going to have such times !

The book grows so engrossing that he had "to make a
rule not to work at it before dinner, except on Sundays
and Mondays " ; but by the end of February social functions

IN ROME 311

are undertaking to put any necessary drag upon the work.
However, on February 27, after a week's depression, he
announces :

Book rushing along. A nice clergyman (of the Church
of England) has made his appearance — really nice, and
I haven't an idea where he came from : he is not like
anybody I know. A Fellow of Christchurch, Prebendary
of Chichester, squire of Great Keynes; old, thin, ruddy,
musical, humorous, gentlemanly, and mystical ; and he
wears an iron-grey wig and will shortly carry a silver-
headed cane. Ultimately he is to represent the academic
spirit — as opposed to the " Gospel of the poor " ; and the
second part of the book turns round him and Gertrude
Maxwell. He carries Nicholas with his nasty seminary
ideas altogether off his legs, and plays melting tunes on
the Chichester organ among the grey shadows, and so on.
I just looked into a room, and there he was, so I listened
to his remarks.

March 26.

My book is creeping on, and becoming very psycho-
logical ; and I am getting the unfortunate Nicholas into
such an internal tangle that I cannot imagine how I am
ever to get him out ; and he has got to go deeper yet,
poor man; and finally a kind of Beth will get him out,
I suppose. And I am getting really sorry for Gertrude.
She is so very nice that I hardly have the heart to make
her end so drearily ; but she will do it, and I can't stop
her.

Easter, with its ''whirl of ceremonies," intervened.
"The book is hopelessly stuck. It is no sort of good
doing it sentence by sentence — and my pond is empty,
of course."

However, the "really nice" clergyman, "my old
friend Mr. Rogers, to my great regret, has turned out to
be a shallow, old, heartless man. I don't know what to
do, I am so sorry. He was so nice before. These people
are going along quite independently of me, and I can't
help it. And another nice man is turning out rather a

312 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

brute too." A little later, and "the book is sailing ahead
again." He reads it aloud to a priest, who is delighted,
but foresees violent criticism. Benson, he holds, though
touching " the most delicate possible point " (a priest
falling in love), has not " said one word that is offensive
at bottom." " He has encouraged me enormously. He
sat, the other night, trembling with excitement, with his
mouth and eyes open, as we skirted along the very brink
of what was possible, and he panted with relief like a
whale when it was over. I am pleased with myself."
New characters appear and vanish. The first draft will
easily be finished by his return. "You will be pestered
with the whole of it, every word from beginning to end,
over again." By May 15 : "I only have about three more
chapters or so. It has been flowing like a stream. It
must be called A Seminary Priest of the Seventeenth
Century}- I have to run furiously with pen and paper
all over the country after my characters ; they are be-
having wildly, and most psychologically ; and Dr. Ken
has just been appointed Bishop of Bath and Wells, and
the Jesuits are on the very edge of the line, so that it
depends on your prejudices as to what you think of their
actions, exactly as it does in real life. My Irish priest
giggles all over at their goings-on, and says it is perfectly
inoffensive, and just like them." On May 21 he is in
retreat at Sant' Anselmo. The book "is just on the
point of ending ; only one more chapter now ; and I
tremble so much that I daren't begin it. The finality of
it paralyses me. I shall read it solemnly aloud at Tre-
mans, so to speak, from 12-1 and 4-5 on Mondays,
Wednesdays and Fridays, whether anyone comes to
listen or not."

^ He had not yet experience in the phoice of " selling " titles.

IN ROME 313

Trinity Sunday. — The book is FINISHED. I do wonder
whether it is any good at all. I shall love to read it aloud.
And now comes the labour of rewriting it ; there are
endless things to do at it. All kinds of people have to
be planed down and carved and re-grouped. But I shall
reserve the general re-editing until I come home.

He had added, too, one delightful postscript :

P.S. — Nell Gwyn is at this moment bowing on a
platform, and I must rush and let her sit down.

Little more is needed to make us regret that Oddsfish
was not allowed to appear more nearly as it was con-
ceived.

Besides this book, he was working at the City Set on a
Hill, of which mention has sufficiently been made above ;
and in April he is still toiling away, with immense joy, at
proofs of A Book of the Love of Jesus.

" It is heavenly. It begins : ' When thou orderest thy-
self to pray or to have any devotion, begin by having a
privy place away from all manner of noise. ... Sit there,
or kneel there, as is most to thine ease. Then, be thou
lord or lady, think that thou hast a God that made thee of
nought . . .' and so on. I wish," he adds wistfully, " I
could get a privy place here, away from all manner of
noise ! "

To his first convert, Miss Lethbridge, he later wrote :

Yes ; aren't those old English devotions quite perfect ?
They are so extremely sturdy too, and have a kind of pierc-
ing sweetness that is to the ordinary sweetness as flowers
are to artificial scents. They are to ordinary devotions as
Palestrina to Gounod, Pugin to Bodley, &c. &c. . . . For
one's private prayers, it seems to one that with the office
to represent liturgy, and with the old English devotions as
material for mental prayer, one is completely equipped.

However, in April 1904 ^ he declared that '' I am terribly

^ spiritual Letters^ p. 73.

314 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

afraid that Catholics will not care for the book. It is too
Saxon — such words as ' amiable ' are not permitted for
a moment. But I am sure you will like it. The devotions
are an extraordinary mixture of passion and restraint,
strength and delicacy. ..." A friend at Rome gaily
agreed with him : " Catholics won't in the least under-
stand them. All they want is a dreadful thing called 'An
Universal Prayer,' in which one asks God to make one
' submissive to one's superiors, condescending to inferiors,'
&c." ; while long ago his Anglican publisher had regretted
that the book " fell between the two stools of devotion and
scholarship." Yet in May he has resolved not to be
deterred by either group of critics, and decides on the
design for the cover — pierced hearts and roses, and " a
frontispiece of the Five Wounds." You will notice that
this is the book of which Lady Maxwell in By What
Authority keeps a slightly idealised edition beside her, in
the shadow of the yew hedge as she and her sister, the
old ex-nun, take it by turns to read and embroider at
Great Keynes.

The book did not actually appear till late in 1904, and
acknowledged its debt to the suggestions and help of Fr.
Frere of Mirfield. The bulk of the material is drawn
from the writings of Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole,
near Doncaster, who died in a.d. 1349. A brief account
of this English mystic, whom Benson loved second only
to Juliana, the ankress of Norwich, is added in an appendix
to the prayers, and Rolle himself will reappear as the
foundation of the exquisite Richard Raynal, the book
which its author loved best of all his writings, while the
name Rolle, curiously enough, is deliberately given, in shape
Rolls, to the rather terrible hermit of The Sentimentalists ,
just as Abbot Raynal, of Sant' Anselmo in Rome, will

IN ROME 315

supply a name for the saintly hero of the later romance.
In his preface Benson explains his system of a minimum
of adaptation and adds an introduction dealing with the
main ''Characteristics of English devotions." These he
reduces entirely to the principle announced by Mother
Juliana when, disregarding the friendly " proffer in her
reason to look up past Christ to His Father," she
" answered inwardly with all the might of my soul, and
said : Nay ; I may not ; for Thou art my Heaven ... I
would liever have been in that pain till Doomsday than to
come to Heaven otherwise than by Him. . . . Thus was
I learned to choose Jesus to my Heaven." From the
passionate and, if you will, downright romantic devotion
to the Humanity of Jesus Christ flowed directly the extra-
ordinary intimacy of speech in these old devotions, and
of "tender colloquy" with our Lord which so much
affronts the orderly prayer forms of our cultured worship ;
Benson hated Latinisms and loathed gush ; but he could
not bear formality, and was sure love should be ardent
and eager in its ways. Filial worship for Mary, and a
minute devotion to the details of the Passion, were further
consequences of the direct childlike association between
the writers of these prayers and the unseen Presences. I
would say at once that Benson's own amazing ejaculations,
his " Dear Lord, do wait just one moment " ; even his
"Oh yes, Lord — just one more cigarette," were expres-
sions (shocking, it may be, to those whose spiritual lives
are lived, as most men's are, on a totally different plane)
witnessing to the presence in him of this self-same child-
like familiarity of intercourse. And if the possibility of
this habit requires more illustration, I would send the
sceptical outright to the Life of Mother Margaret Hallahan,
who is herself sufficient answer. For the vividness and

3i6 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

sweetness of such intercourse, apart from its whimsicality,
he himself refers to the spiritual habit of John Inglesant ;
and with a fearless trust in truth, he tells you of the same
spirit dominant in the Puritan Isabel ^ whose whole
spiritual life centres round the Person of Jesus Christ.
JhesUy JhesUy esto michi Jhesus was long to him a sufficient
prayer. The Friendship of Christ is his own tale of this.

His life at Rome, however, was far from being merely
one of worship and of literature. Roman, especially
Anglo- and American-Roman, society claimed him ; and
in his letters to his mother, it is easy to follow his gradu-
ally changing views upon its character.

He was initiated soon enough into the preliminaries
of Roman social life.

November 20.

There is a lot of stuff here about calling that I cannot
bear ; it is all the same thing. We have to have cards
printed, and leave them on people ; and they come and
leave them on us ; and then you never see them again.
... It all does seem to me a most astounding waste of
time.

But his earliest friends are domestic and ecclesiastical :

I have made great friends with two extremely Irish
priests, with flaming red faces and a brogue that leaves
stains behind it, and a strong smell of snuff. But they
are delightful ; and one of them is the best-educated man
[I have met] ! . . . [he] knows lots of things — George
Meredith and George Eliot and optics and innumerable
funny stories not connected with ecclesiasticism. I have
given him John Inglesant to read, and he is absorbed by
it at present ; but he can't hold with Fr. Sancta Clara's
treatment of Inglesant at all !

Apart from these, his animals make him happy. He
has a new dog, two cats, two parrots ; and " The cats come

^ By What Authority, p. ii.

IN ROME 317

continually to my room, especially one who climbs on to
my shoulders and lies down on the back of my neck."

His visit to Naples, moreover, opened out wider experi-
ences, and before Christmas he had a standing invitation
to a villa at Fiesole, and soon enough he begins to inveigh
against feminine " clacking " and that anti-Anglican gossip
which always makes him lose his temper. It is in January
that the round of hotel-visiting begins : already he despairs.

[anuary 18.

I am beginning to meet a lot of people ; and I solemnly
march out with visiting cards in a cigarette case nearly
every afternoon, in buckled shoes and a furry hat ; but I
cannot abide it. One sits and quacks about small ecclesi-
astical details until one never wants to see a chasuble or a
relic again. Bah !

January 23.

I have made a number of acquaintances, most of whom
I never wish to see again ; they talk ecclesiastical shop to
me, down to my level, until I want to tell them I am an
ancient Roman, and burn incense to Jupiter ; but I think
they would rather like that, so I refrain.

Among these, however, he will find others to refresh
him. Of one friend he writes : " She has a delightful sort
of spiritual and moral aroma and an English air that was
like a summer breeze in this country."

But he begins to consider that the cleavage of really
ultimate importance is between " Old and New Catholics,"
or again, between " Black and White."

There are two classes in the Church : (i) " Old Catholics,"
who are still smarting from the memory of the Penal Laws
and who, rather naturally, but very wrongly, think that
every convert is a wolf, or rather an ass, in sheep's clothing,
and that there is no grace or goodness anywhere but among
themselves ; (2) modern people, who have grasped that the
world has moved on, and that exclusiveness is untrue, as
well as bad policy, and that converts have a knowledge of

31 8 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

the world outside that no one else can have ; and that
converts can be as papal as you like, without being latitudi-
narian. There is no doubt that (i) is decreasing, and that,
whether they like it or not, new blood means new ideas. . . .
And at present the conflict lies there. Really that principle
goes deep — or rather those two principles ; and they
underlie the whole secret of growth, viz. centralisation and
expansion, and a healthy growth must include both ; the
"lengthening of cords and the strengthening of stakes."
My diagnosis, therefore, is that we shall get more and more
papalism and more and more breadth, and the " Curia "
and the modern thought are correlative and complementary.

Mrs. Benson diagnosed in the antagonism of the " old "
Catholics towards the " new " that f eehng which is summed
up in the reproachful phrase, " Thou hast made them equal
unto us " ; while as for centralisation and decentralisation,
" Don't you think," she suggested, " it often has to be one
at a time ? " To tell the truth, Benson was not thinking
much at all just now. He was collecting impressions and
allowing his soul to respond vigorously to each emotion as
it came. Later he will synthesise. One of his most
permanent conclusions will be, that never once has he
personally experienced anything save what was kind and
courteous, and indeed more than generous, at the hands
of the Old and of the Black.

He visits Sant' Anselmo's with two ladies, and enjoys it.
" But I cannot see myself quacking away at tea and getting
in and out of victorias and so on ; it is wretched work."
But he immediately follows this up with a '' quacking tea-
party," at which he tells ghost-stories, and by February 20
he has hauled down the flag. He dines out, it being a
Friday in Lent, with an American millionaire. He was
reassured " by being shown first into a private room, where
two Cardinals and an Archbishop were bowing and murmur-
ing to one another and to four or five magnificent ladies ;

IN ROME 319

but I got out with fair grace." Moreover, he fully enjoyed
himself, and there were '' an immense amount of very funny
stories." And now the pen-pictures begin. There is the
stout, fabulously rich lady who lives in a palace and thinks
him a sort of Walter Pater : " You should hear our high
talk ! I was conducted gravely round the library the other
day, and had to comment in a literary manner on people
I had scarcely heard of." Books are sent him. He is
going ... "to make acute remarks about Paul Bourget,
and pull him solemnly to bits — Lor ! " In fact, he can say
by February, " I contemplate myself, and am amazed,
because I am beginning to quack as if I had never done
anything else." With one hostess " I, so to speak, take my
meals once a day and twice on Sunday " ; another, whom
he doesn't much like, "so to speak, goes to tea with the
Pope." He meets and sees much of the late Lady Herbert
of Lea, " black of the black," but whom the English colony
in Rome will certainly remember with affectionate respect
for very many years. Her drawing-room was undoubtedly
a magnet for the devout and clerically-minded laity ; but
it was not least by the good offices of some in her immediate
entourage that the doors of those white salons which he
ultimately found so congenial began to open for him.
" It is most interesting," he keeps repeating, " but very,
very odd. I have never spent such a queer Lent." But
he made some enduring friends. For many years the
name of Princess Ruspoli, whose sons he assisted in their
education at Eton, recurs in his letters. " Also," he writes,
" I have met some more of the Vaughans ; they are a
wonderful family, all simply as good as gold, and asto-
nishingly simple. There is a nice Captain Vaughan,
with beautiful boots, and a face like a hidalgo, intensely
religious." Father Bernard Vaughan was full of admiration

320 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

for Mgr. Benson in later days ; he realised how fully
Benson's " blossoming " was due to his Catholic atmos-
phere. Benson considered Father Vaughan's sermons
very "evangelical," and obtained his promise to preach
when Buntingford Church should be opened ; ^ and it was
in Mrs. Charles Vaughan's house at Broadway that he
took what was almost his latest holiday. It was now,
too, that he met Lady Kenmare, whose hospitality in
Ireland was to create for him some of the most refreshing
spaces in his laborious years ; and Cardinal, then Abbot,
Gasquet, ^^ so nice, and English and sensible. And he will
not let me kiss his hand. . . . He is giving a lecture pre-
sently to a Society of Anglican clergy, and is going
to do Henry III, and talked to me about Provisors as if
I knew all about it ! "

" I have also," he writes, " been meeting some danger-
ously White people, and like them very much more than
the Blacks ; they are really sensible ; and above all I had
a solemn conversation in Italian for forty minutes with
Don Murri, the leader of the Social Democratic Catholics.
He is a clergyman, small and black and academic, and is
a sort of Mephistopheles to the Blacks. We conspired to
meet, privately — I said I daren't go to his house ; and, so
to speak, we all wore sombreros and cloaks. It was ex-
ceedingly funny. He only once entreated me to say a
sentence again in English, as he thought he would be able
to understand it better so. . . ."

" I have been meeting some more horrid Blacks," he
writes on Low Sunday, '' with their minds about as t3ig as
o ; I want to plant them one by one on separate islands
in the middle of the Atlantic, and let them be rained and
blowed upon until they understand that Almighty God
is a little larger than themselves. But I am afraid they
would only make an oblation of their sufferings to St.
Joseph in honour of the Fourteen Misunderstandings of

1 A promise kept when Mgr. Benson was there no more to assist.

IN ROME 321

St. Symphorosa, for the Intentions of the Pope. I have
also been meeting some nice large people, convinced
papists — who hate clergy and functions and businesses —
almost as much as I do. I sat next a nice girl of that
sort yesterday at lunch, and we didn't talk about St.
Gregory once."

"It was," he found, a "real delight" to meet people
like the distinguished prelate who, on his saying he wanted
to serve Mass at certain shrines, replied, "Oh, I don't
hold with all that shrine business " ; and with the lady
who is " sound and sensible, though a papist ; when there
is a function in Rome she immediately gets a cab and
drives out at the gate farthest from it ; and she loathes
clergymen. The more one is here, the more one settles
down on two facts — (i) that the Rock of Peter is the only
conceivable foundation ; (2) that a large number of people,
especially clergymen, who stand on that Rock, are hope-
less." In his letter of May i, at a hint from his mother,
he develops the distinction between the Rock and its
tenants. He still deplores that pruning off of "every
shoot and leaf except the ones of faith and morals " which
he believes the seminary system inflicts on its victims ;
but he already sees that " when you do get a nice priest,
he is simply nicer and broader than anyone in the world."
For once, he applies a principle of judgment from which
great consequences for his whole life proceed.

" Partly," he says, " I think the hopelessness of the
others comes from the fact that many people are unable to
hold more than one idea at a time. In Anglicans that one
idea is the mystery of God ; in papists, the revelation of
God. The two texts that correspond to these two points
are (i) 'God is a Spirit,' (2) 'The Word was made flesh.'
And, for practical life, I have no sort of doubt that the
second is the best. Lor ! it is all so clear ; and I am
working all that into my book."

I X

322 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

" I was awfully interested," Mrs. Benson replied, " in
all you say about the ' Rock and the people who stand on
it,' and especially the two texts — and I accept fully the
first as ours, though we naturally both claim each others'
also. Yet, after all, * God is a Spirit ' are our Lord's own
words. I think it is qmfe true that you specialise much
more than we do, and divide life up, and 'for practical
life ' many Roman ways seem to me much more adapted.
We rather take a great principle, and chuck it out, and
leave people to do what they can with it ; it all comes
back to the two large principles of Liberty and Authority.
Our people make just the mistakes and get into just the
difficulties which attend learning your responsibilities, and
yours seem to me to abandon greatly personal responsi-
bility, and have the virtues and faults of such a position.
Oh, how I should love to be able rea/fy to picture the con-
dition of things as regards all this, before the Reformation ! "

Undoubtedly Benson's charm was making for him
those varied friendships which precluded so much that
might be narrow and bitter in one whose friends were
few and homogeneous.

" It is really rather remarkable," he writes, " the way
in which we have made friends with both sides. We lunch
with Lady X about once a week, where everybody is coal-
black, and there is nobody but clergymen and the devout ;
and go in and out anyhow at the Y's, where there is never
a clergyman to be seen. I wonder if we are simply crafty
hypocrites."

He was most happy, too, in the society of Mr. and Mrs.
Wilfrid Ward, with whom he inaugurated an acquaintance
which brought him into touch with some of his most con-
genial friends — Mr. Reginald Balfour, for instance, with
whom he was to collaborate, and other fellow-contributors
to the Dublin Review. It was a happiness to which he
often recurs that here he once more met Lord Halifax.
" I walked home with him, and we jawed."

He had, too, in April, an interesting meeting at an oppo-

IN ROME 323

site extreme — with the Rev. R. J. Campbell, then of the City
Temple.

To Miss Kyle he wrote :

I met Mr. Campbell the other day, the minister of the
City Temple, and I hardly ever have met anybody so attrac-
tive. . . . He was the kind of person with whom one wastes
no time in talking about the weather and the train-service,
but with whom one can get to the point at once — I don't
mean of controversy, but of common religion. I am look-
ing forward so much to seeing him in England. He was
simply delightful, and won everyone's heart.

The friendship was not transitory, but proved, indeed,
so faithful, and was so unlooked for, I confess, by many
who restrain their activities and affections to those " of the
household," that I may be allowed to emphasize it some-
what by quoting almost in full the very interesting letter
Mr. Campbell has courteously written to me upon his rela-
tions with Hugh Benson.

It would be beside the mark altogether were I to add my
own comments upon Mr. Campbell's judgment ; any point
of which he speaks, and which appears to suggest reflection,
will, I hope, be treated elsewhere in these pages.

Savernake, Aston Road, Ealing, W.,
19.5.15-
Dear Father Martindale, — In compliance with your
very kind request, I can but say that it affords me gratifica-
tion to say a little about my late friend Mgr. Benson. I
first met him in Rome soon after his reception into the
Catholic Church. We were both the guests at the time of
Fr. Whitmee of San Silvestro in Capite. I was strongly
attracted to him, and from that time until his death we
remained on terms of friendship, and met at not infrequent
intervals. Curiously enough, however, I do not recollect
ever having met him in the company of other Catholics,
except on the occasion specified, although I am fortunate
in enjoying the friendship of not a few. I never went to
Hare Street, and now deeply regret that I was unable to

324 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

keep my promise to do so in response to his repeated
kindly invitations. He has been to see me on occasions
even at the City Temple — privately, of course, and not
during the holding of any religious service. We have also
met at the house of a Protestant friend, and I have been
his chairman at three or four public meetings during the
last ten or a dozen years. He has twice or thrice addressed
City Temple audiences, each time with the greatest accept-
ance ; indeed, it is but true to say that no member of
another communion was more loved and admired by my
people than he. In saying this perhaps I ought to add
that the meetings in question were not held on the City
Temple premises, but in public buildings elsewhere. The
most memorable of these took place only a short time
before his death, when he spoke on psychological research
from a religious standpoint. Nearly three thousand per-
sons heard that address, which was a remarkable feat of
oratory as well as of clear, sane reasoning and illuminating
statement. His previous visit had been to a much more
restricted audience, and on a semi-private occasion, when
he discoursed with equal eloquence on the Catholic Church
and the Future.

His influence among Protestants was extraordinary ; I
do not know any living Catholic who approaches it. As
he said himself, the last time he stood before a City Temple
assembly, twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable
that a Catholic speaker expounding Catholic doctrine
would have been given a sympathetic hearing on a Pro-
testant platform. He was good enough to credit the
difference to me, and said so very emphatically in replying
to a vote of thanks ; but in this he was mistaken ; it was
he himself who made the difference. The charm and
beauty, the boyish frankness of his manner, together with
his evident sincerity and spiritual power, captivated every-
body and made him irresistible. Perhaps I ought to
mention that for some years before his death he had occu-
pied with myself and others a place on the advisory board
of the Christian Commonwealth, a religious periodical with
an open platform — a sort of popular Hibbert Journal. Mgr.
Benson's position there was used solely for the purpose of
revising before it appeared any reference to the Catholic
Church or statement bearing upon Catholic views in regard
to public affairs. It did not follow that he agreed with it,
but in the interests of fairness and accuracy such articles

IN ROME 325

or paragraphs were always submitted to him before publi-
cation.

As to my own personal relations with him, there is not
much that I should care to say in print. I remember
asking him in Rome, in the first flush of his enthusiasm as
a convert, what he found in the Church of his adoption
that he had not found in the Church of his father, begging
him at the same time not to give any reply if he shrank
from doing so. He sat for a moment or two in silence,
and then, turning sharply round and facing me, and looking
straight into my eyes, he answered without hesitation,
" Absolute spiritual peace." No more was said just then ;
but we discussed the subject more fully afterwards, and
again in England only a few weeks before his death. On
this last occasion I reminded him of his testimony of twelve
years before, and asked him where he stood now in relation
to the matter with his larger experience to draw upon.
" Oh," he replied, smiling, " I am quite a fanatic now." If
so, he was a very gracious fanatic. He went on to explain
that what to him at first had been a sense of relief and
gladness in finding his proper spiritual home had now
become an all-absorbing enthusiasm and devotion ; he
lived for nothing else. Alas, he always impressed me as
living too vehemently ; he was for ever going full steam
ahead. At another time he remarked to me very impres-
sively when speaking of the same subject, " No man living
can understand the Catholic Church, she is so rich, so
wonderful, so many-sided, so supernatural. You ask me
to explain the unexplainable in attempting to analyse her
life and power. I understand her less to-day than I
thought I did when she first drew me to her heart, but I
love her infinitely more." He was too courteous to press
anyone on the subject of religious belief, but he often told
me I should end by becoming a Catholic myself ; in fact,
he declared I was one already by temperament. I have
frequently wondered whether it was this temperamental
affinity which drew us to each other despite the wide
differences of intellectual outlook. For I must admit that
Mgr. Benson never impressed me as having any real
reasons for being a Catholic ; he just went over because he
must, and not, so far as I could judge, from any compel-
ling intellectual motive. I am not saying that his conver-
sion was any the less sound because of that ; to make the
great issues of life turn solely upon argument is surely a very

326 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

futile proceeding ; but, unless I am utterly mistaken, the
intellect played almost no part in the tremendous decision
which led him to submit to Rome. His mind struck me
as quick rather than profound, ardent and eager rather
than original or very penetrating. I think he would have
acknowledged this, for he more than once quoted to me
our Lord's saying about the divine mysteries hidden from
the wise and revealed to babes. His ignorance on Biblical
criticism was somewhat abysmal, even startlingly so ; in
fact, our conversations have led me to infer that his read-
ing was never very thorough in anything. He had a creative
genius of his own and a power of assimilating what he
wanted, but never of study for study's sake. . . . — Yours
very truly, R. J. Campbell.

Mr. Campbell, in a sermon spoken from the City
Temple pulpit, offered a warm tribute to Mgr. Benson's
memory.

Benson made the usual excursions with these friends;
one was to Tusculum.

You should have just heard my High Talk ; Poetry
and Civilisation, and Life and Being ; and I played
absurd games, Fizz and Buzz, with the children, and we
told stories round. Also I told an enormous story in
the theatre, about an old Roman population who had
escaped at the Gothic invasion, and two boys and a girl
who found their way to them by a subterranean passage.
And I also descended a well by a rope, with the boy.
When we got back I drove solemnly in a victoria with
the girl, and she told me all about her hat and how
much it cost, and that it was Parisian. She is aged ten ;
and we went to another awful crush — Lor ! But we
had a heavenly day ; with two carabineers to guard us
from brigands ; and the blue Sabine Hills, and the sea,
and the violets !!!...! am degenerating into a quacker
at tea-tables, and shall probably play lawn-tennis in a
black flannel shirt when I get home again.

He goes to Ostia, and attends children's balls, " all in
perukes, and powder, and patches, and swords," but still
finds children's parties odd " on Sunday." The Villa

IN ROME 327

d'Este enchants him ; but " yesterday there was a crush,

making a noise like a menagerie, at the 's here, who

have taken an entire palace — and there were five cardinals,
and monsignori like the sand of the sea — and everybody
drank champagne at 5 p.m." Again, he goes to Anzio,
" as usual the only ecclesiastic ! as I went out and sat
on the ruins of Nero's villa, built into this sea, with a
sea and sky like turquoise."

The rather bitter fruit of this tree of most imperfect
knowledge is set out for our consumption in the first
pages of Initiation. There are in this, I would emphasize,
no serious caricatures, and no deliberate studies of real
" cases." However, the picture, for instance, of the
Marchioness Daly is unkind. It is true to type ; but we
know how cruelly, though tacitly, portrait-painters, if
such their desire, can mock. Her " under-current of
acidity," her " peevish delight in discerning, and thrust-
ing a pin through, little cracks and holes in reputations " ;
her reputed conversations with the Secretary of State,
in which that prelate, it appeared, took her advice in
every particular, and begged that he might have the
advantage of it always in the future, are told of barely
with a smile, certainly with no genial laugh. You will
prefer the wealthy American, Mrs. Hecker, "one blaze
of intelligence," hitting at once on all the right points
in what she looked at, and on the right epithets for
describing them ; contemplating the Catacombs " in a
kind of ecstasy of intelligence," and finding that " this
is all too lovely — so truly Catholic ; and, Sir Nevill, you
make it just complete. You stand for . . . England,
you know, and the feudal system . . . and here's the
Trappist monk, to take us back to Silence. We're all
here — a microcosm, you might say. But what I want

32 8 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

to know is, What does all this say to me ? " — (She waved
an admirably gloved hand round the tangled garden
wilderness) — " What is its message to me right now ?
What am I to take away with me that I hadn't before ? "
She "always saw the dramatic element a shade quicker
than anyone else," and in that resembles Benson himself,
and perhaps that was one reason why he liked her,
though he found her explicit statements a trifle nickel-
plated for his taste. Her husband, "attentive and trim,"
was as negligible as the anxious Marquis ; but he has
his reality, as have the grave, magnificent cardinals,
Daniels in whose den Nevill found himself a lion ; the
Italian priest, very recollected and well-bred, like "a
Guardsman who has become a seminarian " ; the Princess
Mareschi, small, faded, shabby, the friend of cardinals,
blackest of the black, of an unmistakable dignity, the
replica, in Italian disguise, " of unmarried Evangelical
daughters and sisters of ancient English dukes ; only
she was a Catholic, and talked four languages with equal
ease, and they but one." With all these folk Nevill makes
the excursions Benson made, to Frascati, to St. Callixtus,
up to the Pincian. With Benson, he makes certain
reflections proper to Rome, and, first and foremost, upon
the unspanned gulf between two rival camps, clergy and
laity. . . .

But if you would see a page on which Benson's own
beliefs are more truly grouped and correlated than else-
where, you must turn to the first visit of the English
tourists to the Pincian, in The Coward. They look through
the sunset across Rome, and the ancient and mediaeval
and modern cities are visible, not alone in the motley crowd
that throngs them, but in actual bricks and mortar stretch-
ing in all directions, broken by masses of high buildings,

IN ROME 329

such as Capitol and palazzo and hotel, or fine shafts of
obelisk or column or chimney, by campaniles and domes
innumerable, but crowned irrevocably by St. Peter's
cupola. A very powerful sense of mysticism, and a fine
grasp of the massive periods of history, seen in due
perspective, are revealed in all this page, and once more,
irresistibly, the sacramental, incarnational value of Rome
displays itself; and Benson knows, and even the half-
awakened Etonian, Valentine, can feel, that somehow
before him lies all the concentrated Christianity of the past
and all the promise of an unfailing future.

Benson had not been a week in Rome before he began
to make arrangements for his future. On November 7th he
writes that he has visited the Archbishop (now Cardinal
Archbishop) of Westminster, who of course could not
commit himself nor his superiors to any promise of speedy
ordination, while the general impression was, that two
years at least must elapse before it could be given, and
that the tonsure itself must not be expected before Christ-
mas. Hugh looks forward to receiving it from the Bishop
of Southwark as soon as he is appointed. By December
he is revising his hopes. A suggestion has been made that
not England, but America, should be his chosen field of
work. This day-dream occupied him some three months.

On December 17th his mother writes :

As to America, the thought of it attracts me, for you,
very much. It would be such a new field, so full of
life — and apparently, need — and the Church seems so
alive there in a full and most large and reasonable way.
Tell me every point as it comes to you.

On the 27th he answers :

The American is continually at me about going out
there. But I think I should be too appallingly homesick ;

330 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

but the work there sounds immensely attractive. It is
quite odd how laymen entreat me not to go into re-
ligion ; they say that secular priests in England are quite
hopeless, and that every respectable person goes into
religion nowadays — especially to the Benedictines.

And on January 3rd he returns to the subject :

Now, what do you think about America, really and
truly ? It is rather growing on me. Not that I have
anything but horror at the thought of leaving England ;
but that exactly two things that I can do less inefficiently than
other things — viz. mission preaching and literary work
(editing of a Catholic newspaper) — are what are offered
me. It would only mean binding myself for probably
not less than three years ; ordination next Christmas,
and a month or two's holiday each summer if I wished
it. But it would be extraordinarily expensive coming
to England, and I probably could not do it every year.
There is really a good chance of several here accepting
it. If you said No, I shouldn't in the least feel you were
standing in my way, but that that was a "leading." I
am perfectly willing to be pushed about by Divine Provi-
dence ; and the thing that pushes hardest will win ; and
I shall be perfectly content. Personally I still feel that
homesickness will simply incapacitate me.

His mother replied from Tremans on January 7th that
she won't say No about America. " Your own principles
of decision which you gave me one day — of thinking— of
praying — of fixing a time and putting it away — all come
in well here." She urges that homesickness may wane,
once he is in America. "They say, with what truth I do
not know, that there is often not enough work for secular
priests in England." America is suited to him ; he could
get back — in fact she could not bear that he should not do
so. " But I will try with both hands and my whole heart
to see as far as I can what is the noblest and fullest thing
you can do. You can't make such a decision in a moment.

IN ROME 331

and things always come to guide one before it has to be
finally made."

What moved him especially was what in his unfocused
view he took for the mistaken attitude of authorities
towards instructed converts.

Already on November 20 he had written :

All that I want to do is to say Mass and make sermons
and preach and deal with people ; and all that I am
allowed to do is to come out here and read theology that
I know already, and learn colloquial Latin and go through
a number of social acts and ecclesiastical functions ! But
perhaps they know best.

Undoubtedly they knew best ! Even at the time,
Hugh Benson knew they did. At the risk of seeming
laborious, pedantic, and lacking in all humour, I would
insist that Hugh Benson talked — when he felt none
would misunderstand him — far more than he really meant.
Of course he felt the curb, as do all young men full of
eagerness to begin. As for theology, he recognised long
after his extra year, even, at Cambridge, how sketchy was
his knowledge of most of its technicalities ; as for the
long wait — well, it is not his disgrace that he was tempted
to resent it, but his pride that he so seldom yielded.

His sister wrote, with insight almost, I feel, unparalleled
in this correspondence, and at an hour when he was
hesitating about the more rudimentary features of his
future, and wondering whether, as a lay oblate of some
religious house (had he been reading his favourite Huys-
mans' L'Oblat?) he could devote himself wholly to literary
work.

I am awfully interested about your plans. I don't
want you to be an oblate doing literary work. And O
don't take any place which might lead to this. The
reasons are partly special, and partly general — special,

332 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

that surely you must be a priest ; general, that I don't
think that as a family even as regards literary work there
is sufficient profundity to enable anyone safely to do

that only. I always felt this about , and though I

can't help thinking your gift is perhaps greater, yet I
don't believe in any case the well is deep enough not
to need constant replenishment, otherwise it will either run
dry or thin. Symbolism breaks down. ... I think there
is less originality than power of assimilation of material
and reproduction in a new form.

On November 29 he has learnt with horror of a movement
to get the ex-Anglican clergy three years' training ; so he
feels that even if he does get two, he will be satisfied.
For consolation he has " taken to a sort of mild smoking ;
it really became almost necessary — but I never smoke
more than three [cigarettes] a day so far, and often none
at all. So I think I am cured."

At this moment, then, his personal feelings crystallised
themselves in tirades against the seminary system, as,
judging from what he considered its results, it displayed
itself. These results he considered " hopeless " — men who
can talk ceremonial and casuistry and nothing else.

On December 6 he wrote thus :

One is slowly sorting impressions now, and they
are instructive. Will it bore you to hear them ?

(i) Everyone, priests and all, first of all have an
intense faith and realisation of the supernatural, and
express it perfectly frankly in words and behaviour —
quite naturally and devoutly.

(2) They are also, therefore, flippant very often. It
is the seamy side of faith. They make jokes that make
one's hair stand on end. But they do it, not because
they don't, but because they do believe so intensely.

(3) They are rather stupid. That is the fault of the
seminary system ; it teaches them their business and
their faith admirably, but it teaches them nothing else
at all. But when, as in the case of great directors, they
do know human nature, they know it tar better than any-

IN ROME 333

one else in the world. If I had the training of a boy for
the priesthood, I would first shelter him entirely with a
great deal of attractive religion, appealing to his heart,
and dogmatic religion, appealing to his intellect, till he
was fourteen. Then I would send him to Eton or Win-
chester till he was eighteen,^ then to a seminary for a
year or two, then to a university, Oxford or Cambridge, till
he was twenty-four, then to a seminary again for three
years. And I believe he would be a splendid priest after
that. If I had to cut anything out of the course, I would
cut out the public school.

His letter of December 20 was, one may say, frankly
bitter on this subject :

One also finds here the most amazing deference for
priests. At last I have learnt that when I want to put
forward an unpopular view, one can always gild the pill
by saying, " A priest said to me the other day. . . ." Here
one can get priests in support of any tolerable opinion,
and one can generally quote them. It is like the coinage :
one must have the stamp, and then it is all right.

My private coach here is a popular preacher. I could
not understand him until I learnt that ; and now I sit
and listen, and it is excellent stuff. He is very strongly
on our (converts') side, or against conservatism in the
authorities, and in plotting with Father Whitmee here

to get us ordained as quickly as possible. Mr. here

has a lovely phrase, a " piece." A " piece " is a kind
of formality which one has "to say" in order to pass
muster. If one will " say the pieces," one is all right —
e.g. if one will say that of course animals are not
"rational," one can then say what one likes, almost, as
to their immortality and reason. And apparently no one
seems to see that the entire question is begged as to
what the word "rational" means, as I fancy there is
no definition of it that will really exhaust it. And that
system runs through everything. They require verbal
conformity ; and in all questions which are matters of
opinion (not of faith) one must observe the " pieces,"
and then one can say what one likes. There is extra-
ordinary freedom really. And then the other tremendous

I Dick YoUand, in The Sentimentalists, goes to Winchester.

334 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

watchword is the word " edifying." " AH things are
lawful for me, but all are not expedient." Theatres,
bicycling out here, going out without a cassock, &c., are
not " edifying."

Immediately upon this you must read that chapter in
the Papers of a Pariah which deals directly with the
Catholic priest as a seminary product. It is called "A
Father in God," and professes, of course, to be an outside
view of a parish priest, as taken by a thoughtful, unpre-
judiced, in fact sympathetic agnostic. There is excellent
comedy in the first pages, where Father Thorpe deals
firmly with the wealthy Mrs. Johnson, a woman who
would not "bear domineering from even an archangel,"
and who was so important in her sphere that, when she
dined with the banker, she drove both to and from his resi-
dence in a closed fly. . . . The priest's voice, " clear and
peevish," was heard to say nothing but " My dear child,
don't talk such nonsense," and Mrs. Johnson had nothing
to answer save "Very well. Father, if you think so."
And even this was in a tone both "bland and grateful."
Benson's whole point is that a priest is, as he is intended
to be and is accepted as being, a parent, with his moods
and manners, but not, anyhow, a lawyer, who must be
polite, nor a tradesman, who must be subservient. As
representative to his flock of God, his authority is absolute,
always recognised, very circumscribed. Unofficially, how-
ever, yet in direct consequence of his office, his voice is
listened to deferentially in departments widely other than
the theological. And "how strange it is that this state
of affairs should be brought about through the seminary
teaching." What Englishmen want, say the dignitaries
of the Establishment, are men of the world, university
men, gentlemen, public-school men — no others need

IN ROME 335

apply. Isolation, prayer, specialised study, lack of female
society, produce, it is urged, an utterly incompetent type,
sacerdotally correct, but inadequate to equal dealings
with its fellow-men.

Yet precisely the opposite appears to be the case. If
I wish to smoke my pipe with a congenial clergyman, or
to hear reasonable conversation on topics of the day, or
to learn how to deal with a refractory child, or to discuss
the advisability of attending a certain race meeting ; or if,
on the other hand, I need a little brisk consolation, or
have an unpleasant secret to reveal, or an inveterate habit
to overcome, or a complicated moral problem to unravel,
I should not dream of stepping across to the rectory or to
the new vicarage of St. Symphorosa . . .^ (but) I should
unhesitatingly take my hat and go across to the popish
presbytery, where I should find a man who had spent ten
years of his youth in a rigid seminary, but who somehow
had emerged from it a man of the world in the best sense,
neither a large-hearted bully nor a spiritual hypochondriac ;
one who will neither shout at me nor shrink from me, who
will possibly drop his aspirates and be entirely ignorant
of literature and art, but who will yet listen to what I have
to say, understand me when I say it, and give me excellent
advice.

. . . Yes, yes ; the Catholic Church is amazingly
adroit ; she has managed to produce grapes from thorns,
and figs from thistles, and men of the world from semin-
aries. I have not an idea how she does it, unless her own
explanation of it is true — which is that the knowledge of
God is the short cut to knowledge of man, that time spent
in prayer is the most economical investment of a working
hour, and that meditation on supernatural mysteries and
familiarity with supernatural things confer an insight into
ordinary affairs of common life that can be obtained in no
other way — unless once more Christ's words are to be
taken literally, not metaphorically, and that when He said

^ I will not reproduce the vignettes of the warm-hearted, "thumping" rector
and the mortified vicar, into whose pale ear you are invited to open your grief in
his oak -lined vestry on next Saturday. Benson owned that his "agnostic" had
hard luck in his experience of Anglican clergymen ; and the point is, not in what
he denounced in other systems, but in the fact that he learnt radically to revise
his own early views of the results of seminary training.

336 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

that those who for His sake renounced wives and children
and brethren and lands should find themselves treated as
husbands and fathers and brothers in their turn, that
they who lost their life should find it, that they who took
the lowest place should presently stand in the highest,
and that the meek and the peacemakers should inherit the
earth, be called the children of God, shine out as the light
of the world, and be set upon a high hill, a city that cannot
be hid.

Hugh was, however, slightly encouraged by receiving,
at this time, a permission, " stamped all over with cardi-
nals' hats and tiaras," to read books upon the Index; " Lt'dri,"
it stated, " e giornali dalla S. Sede proibiti, a scopo di con-
futarne gli errori."

" So," he rather rashly sums up, " I needn't bother
now, but can read anything."

However, America still beckoned him.

January lo.

. . . America seems wholly different. The priest who
has asked me to come is continually saying, "We want
men like you. We know you know your faith ; and
we want people who can deal with Protestants — we
haven't got any; you would simply sweep them into the
Church." And he proposes to form a Mission Society,

with Father and myself as the nucleus,^ and give us

a free hand to go where we like, and do what we like, and
use all our old methods. It is very tempting ; and the
parochial people will be given an independent parish at
once, if they like it, and not be stuck down as junior curates
under some silly old man.

If I go, I shall probably live at the Cathedral at the
Archbishop's house, take over the newspaper at once,
and go, travelling off all over the place, preaching. Good-
ness me !

The Archbishop looks a splendid person from his
photograph, 6 feet 2 inches tall, very large and beaming,
a convert himself, with a solid face like a butler, and
enormously popular with everybody.

* See Vol. II., p. 209, The Motor Mission,

IN ROME 337

Of course the next thing is to wait to hear what he
says. . . .

His mother felt half enthusiastic about America. At
least it was not so terribly far off as India. . . . But these
speculations, she urged on Hugh, were " of the earth,
earthy." What she wanted was his " entire best."

The pendulum, he announced on January i8, was swing-
ing away from America. " However, we can just wait and
go along, and expect to be pushed violently by Divine
Providence at the proper time. I am delighted you think
as you do. It straightens things out."

Mrs. Benson suggested a final home in England, after
an interlude of America, but, frankly, America is now
eclipsed for Hugh by the delightful gossip that, quite in-
dependently of himself, a " Jesuit plot " is being hatched
to hasten his ordination and to keep him in England. The
fancy is too fascinating to be lightly disregarded.

January 23.

Do you think it is possible ? We may be violently
exaggerating it, but I should not be at all surprised if it
was true. It is great fun, and we are being bland and
innocent and uncommunicative . . . but, at any rate, it is
extremely nice countermining."

Moreover, a suggestion has been made that he should
go back to Cambridge, and live "with the clergyman
who looks after the undergraduates, doing parochial and
preaching work in the Cathedral." " But," he adds, " our
relationships would be very odd with people."

Mrs. Benson, enchanted by the Jesuit plot, none the
less could not feel favourable to the definite suggestion of
Cambridge.

Cambridge — I don't seem to take to it for the present.
I mean, I think you would be in a much better position
I Y

338 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

to work there after a longer time, and when you were, so
to say, on a solid experienced basis. At present I think it
would put you in an extremely difficult and disagreeable
position, and would be scarcely a fair thing to do, scarcely
what you would find you could do, if it came nearer, unless
it was laid upon you as an absolute duty.

However, by January 30, yet another suggestion had
been made. Benson was inclined to grasp at anything
which should get him away from Rome.

He goes to see the Bishop of Northampton, who " is
a nice old man," but

January 30.

proposed my going to Oscott (as a kind of fifth-form
boy) when I said that Rome did not seem to be doing me
much good, which shows that his grasp of the situation
was not what it might be. I don't think we shall come
back for another year if we don't go to America, or get
ordination somehow. I shall try to look out for a religious
house in England where I can go and live and work, but
I shall let them clearly know that I propose to do literary
work there, as well as theology.

On February 6 he writes that a prelate has written
from America, holding out high prospects :

ordination by Christmas, and what work we like. But
people are beginning to write and say that we must come
to England ; that we are " wanted " ; that it will be a
complete misapplication of energy to go to Mission work
which others can do, and leave undone the work which
we are especially fitted to do, and so on, and so on. So
we shall wait to see what the authorities do, and whether
it is more than words.

Moreover, his eye is growing accustomed to a new and
more synoptic outlook over his studies.

" I am getting through a quantity of solid theology.
My goodness ! The scheme of it all is tremendous ; every
possible objection dealt with 1 "

IN ROME 339

However, it is this apologetic view of theology which
still is mainly his : the independent prospect over the
spiritual world, with its schemes and systems of ordered
thought and action, and the tremendous organisation and
supernatural plan, which a theologian, serene and unruffled
by any thought of attack or defence, can contemplate, did
not belong to him, nor was it ever, save in a circumscribed
area of mystical asceticism, thoroughly appreciated by him.

A new scheme, he adds, however, on February 7, had
germinated in the fertile brains of Hugh and of his friends.
The spirit of Newman still hovered over the paths of recent
convert-clerics out in Rome, and it was hinted

that we — i.e. about half a dozen converts — should start

an " Oratory " at B . It is quite extraordinary how

we should fit in ; we have two missionaries, two preachers,
a ceremonialist, a parish priest, an organiser. Really, we
should be able to do a lot. But it is only the vaguest of
ideas so far. Another comfort would be that we should all
be respectably educated ; that no bishop could interfere,
only the Pope ; that we should have an entire veto against
new applicants we did not like. I believe we shall draw a lot
of others like ourselves. So there are a good many alter-
natives. We should begin with a tin church and work-
men's cottages : the life is very like Mirfield. An Oratorian
here suggested it. Each " Oratory," by the way, is abso-
lutely independent of all others, and under the Pope direct,
without any " General " of the Order. [. . .]

P.S. — The " Oratory " would mean that I could continue
to write as much as I liked, and preach sermons, and have
an evangelical prayer meeting every week.

On February 14 he says that plans are standing still.
But Father Talbot has explained to them the Oratorian

scheme. B is " the most inoffensive place," he feels,

that he could start in, as he never preached there. The
vision of tin chapel and cottages melts into that of a

340 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

basilica. " It would be gorgeous, with gilding and mosaics."
Names follow of possible associates.

They are quite delightful^ the most sensible old Catholics
we have met yet, and extremely pious, and anxious for
proper work, and not this eternal dawdling about after
"careers." I loathe that word. Everybody is told to
" make a career," which means that ultimately if you
dawdle and intrigue enough and entirely damn your soul,
you get a small piece of purple to wear in your collar.
Nothing will induce me to make a career.

He sums up :

The Oratory has for it these advantages : " (i) The
work we can do. (2) One will have no work that one can't
do; clubs, music, ceremonial, finance, all done by others.
(3) Fixity of tenure ; no bishop can turn us out. (4)
Respectably educated people to do with, and no danger of
cads. The disadvantages are very few : (i) more difificult
to go into * religion ' afterwards ; (2) finance ; (3) imme-
diate ordination."

But on February 21 he can write that

an ambassador is on his way to Cardinal Respighi "to

say a few plain words about Mr. and me, or rather

not very plain, as (he) said he would have to begin a
long way from the subject, and allude to it in a paren-
thesis." [A dispensation for swift ordination was to be
asked for ; the City set on a Hill was to be presented as
credentials.] " I really daren't ask what he is going to say,
as I am pretty certain that he will colour his story, and I
should have to correct him. They are funny people ! "

Further intercessors were invoked next week, but the
whole scheme was regarded as a mere alternative to
America.

By March 6, the Cardinal had expressed himself " most
favourable," and ordination seemed probable in the summer.
A consequence would be " a little more reading in Moral

IN ROME 341

Theology, in England or in Rome, and London as a pro-
bable destination."

It is the most unique and exceptional thing — unheard
of . . . very tremendous, and almost frightening. It will
mean for me the priesthood before I have been a year in
the Church ! and everybody else, since the world began,
has been at least two.

Probable jealousies, however, darken the horizon else so
brilliant. Next day a note followed, saying that the Pope's
answer had been perfectly favourable, and all that now
was needed was to be shifted to the Westminster arch-
diocese. Ordination seemed due in May or June, and
minor orders before Easter.

" This," he wrote with an ecstatic lack of accuracy, " is
simply a unique event in the entire history of Holy Church,
and I tremble to think of the row that will ensue. But we
are keeping it perfectly quiet until we have the last word
from the Archbishop. So please do not let even a sus-
picion come if you are asked anything about me — and I
know your powers of prevarication. Lor ! — Ever yours in
a hurry, R. H. B."

"One thing," Mrs. Benson wisely wrote, "I trust you
won't do : receive minor orders before your ordination in
May or June is absolutely and definitely promised and
arranged, and not only * favourably considered.' "

Rosy visions transfigure the letter of March 13. The
Pope is '* * happy ' (lieto — laetus) " to help. The whole has
taken place, this player at plots declares, " so entirely, really,
apart from our own efforts " that it must certainly be " all
right." Everyone says the Archbishop will be delighted.
Father Buckler suggests the Cathedral as headquarters.
A lot of outside work, missions, retreats, with " Roman
faculties " for hearing ubiquitous confessions, make a
picture which appeals to him. Tonsure, therefore, at

342 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Easter ? Subdiaconate in April, and diaconate and priest-
hood in May ? Why not ? " Then I shall toil, if necessary,
for a month or so at casuistry."

With the imminence of reality, the more fantastic
pleasures of his game began to lose their savour. Hugh
was sobered, and seriously sought to see whether self had
been responsible for these developments. Again he argues
(March 19) that "this has all descended so amazingly from
the blue that I have no sort of doubt that it is all right,
and that these things have been arranged by Them as is
above." And on March 26 he is seeing that "probably
after ordination it will be better if I, at least, don't do too
much active work all at once." His options are : " (i) Come
out here again and get a doctorate. That apparently
would not be at all difficult, and might be well worth
having in future to quiet silly people who say it is impos-
sible for a recent convert to know theology. (2) Go into
a religious house — Downside, with the Benedictines, or
Woodchester, with the Dominicans, for a year or so. This
I should love. (3) Go to Westminster Cathedral and sit
quiet." The doctorate appeals to him ; Rome, not. Any-
how, he is determined to refuse Father Whitmee's invitation
to preach the next Lent to English-speaking Catholics at
San Silvestro.

His mother likes the idea of a religious house ; she feels
that in the less ordered life he foresees for himself at
Westminster, he would be " frittered without having real
work." He probably felt the same. However, the papers
had arrived by Easter Day ; the examination for minor
orders and subdiaconate together was to be on Tuesday
in Low Week by special privilege, and in English. He
was not nervous. At " a short preliminary test " on Friday
his coach " threw down the book after thirty-five minutes

IN ROME 343

and said, ' You know it all/ which I could have told him
before he began." The examination was, in fact, "not
very formidable. I stood opposite an Italian professor,
a Dominican, and the professor (who is my own coach)
asked me questions at an extraordinary pace in English
for a quarter of an hour, which I answered at the same
pace."

At this point all more distant interests fade behind the
immediate emotions of an ordination promised " presto,
presto," yet ever, it would seem, postponed.^

"After all," he writes on May i, " I didn't get minor
orders to-day. The amazing people at the Vicariate, after
telling me six weeks ago that ' all the papers had come,'
told me on Friday that I had to have certificates of baptism
and confirmation and one or two other things ! So we
have written furiously to England. But we hope, in spite
of it, to go into retreat to-morrow (though we can't be sure
till to-morrow morning), and that I shall have minor orders
in about ten days, and the subdiaconate a day or two later."

" O Hugh 1 " his mother wrote on May 6. "The Italian
mind ! They are God's creation, I know, but I have to
remind myself of it now and again, when they cut across
my English expectations. There ! I have done ! it is
just possible that you may know your own business."

A week later, nothing has happened ; but the affair " is
in the hands of a priest who understands the Vicariate, and
it is going swimmingly."

^ Not that Hugh was painfully absorbed in ordination worries. It was at
this time that he wrote to Mr. A. C. Benson :

Alay 9, 1904.

I read Chesterton's "Watts" about the same time [as your "Tennyson"],
and I liked it rather — at least parts of it were excellent, but there was a trifle
too much Chesterton. It was like a personally conducted tour ; instead of, as in
your book, looking at something through excellent spectacles that some one
else has made. His book made me feel that he was painfully clever — while
yours made me feel I was.

344 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

In fact, he did

receive tonsure and minor orders, "strictly against all pre-
cedent, all at once, on Ascension Day. Generally that
takes fifteen hours in Rome — three ordinations, each from
7 to 12.30, and mine took two hours. And I got them
from a proper Englishman, Archbishop Stonor. I only
heard for certain the day before.

The examination for diaconate and priesthood seemed
due for Tuesday, and retreat previous to the subdiaconate
was for Wednesday. By May 21 all papers had arrived,
all examinations had been passed. Hugh migrated to the
Aventine, and established himself for retreat in the Bene-
dictine monastery of Sant' Anselmo. That superb building,
due chiefly to the impulse and generosity of Leo XIII,
scarcely asks that you should climb its campanile if you
would enjoy one of Rome's grandest views.

" Hinc septem dominos uidere coUes
Et totam licet aestimare Romam."

Martial was sitting on the Janiculum when he wrote
that, and his verses are still there to remind the passer-by.
Still, on those slopes, Garibaldi dominates you ; the Eternal
Rome is sunk somewhat and eclipsed behind the wooded
shoulder of the hill ; from Sant' Anselmo's balconies every-
thing is yours. All Rome, and all the Romes, are there for
you to " reckon up." At Hugh's feet almost, was the Circus
Maximus, and beyond it the incomparable arcading of
imperial palaces on the Palatine. Churches of bewildering
antiquity, and charged with innumerable memories, rose
above trees or roofs. Sta. Sabina, Sta. Prisca in Aventino,
Sant' Alessio nearer still, and, visible in the hollow, the
exquisite campanile of Sta. Maria in Cosmedin, and just
beyond, Newman's titular church, San Giorgio in Velabro.
The yellow river, at the foot of the hill to the east, linked

IN ROME 345

the centuries together, and between the limits of St. Peter's,
the cypress ridge upon the Pincian ridge, the long
yellow fagade of the Quirinal, the little towers of Sta. Maria
Maggiore, and again, the huge Lateran, was clasped all
that multitudinous Rome which stood for quintessence of
all history. Therefore he did not choose to eliminate from
memory the atrocities of modern Roman life — the Palazzo
di Giustizia that crushes out St. Peter's, the Monument that
dwarfs the Capitol, and the aluminium dome of the Jewish
Synagogue, a malapert and purely hideous parvenu. He had
no right to refuse to see what the world he was approach-
ing might contain. 1

To Sant' Anselmo, where her son was preparing himself
for the Roman priesthood, Mrs. Benson wrote :

Tremans, May 19.

Well, you know my heart's desire ! — that your service of
Christ may be more and more full and beautiful and holy.
If it could only have been with us, well. If it must be in
another regiment, well still, if God's will be better served
so. The Royal Ensign waves over us both.

All your letters [she continues] are so delicate, so just
you yourself, and this regular correspondence makes just
the whole difference. I have you, and your life, and I am
sure you have me and mine — us and ours.

S. Anselmo, Monte Aventino,
Rome, May 21, 1904.

My dear Mamma, — Here I am in retreat, and im-
mensely pleased. . . . We came here on Thursday evening —
such a heavenly place — right up above Rome, with great
cloisters and courts, and flowers and ilexes and birds, a
blazing blue sky, and a tall abbey-church. We arrange
our days exactly as we like, but as a matter of fact I get up
about 5.30, go to Mass at 6, and breakfast at 7 ; then

^ That this is no fantasia of the imagination, but that Benson really felt these
things, I would argue from the page in The Coward already alluded to, where,
viewing Rome from the opposite side to Sant' Anselmo, he sees in it nothing less
than a continuing of the Incarnation.

346 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

dawdle a little and read and smoke a cigarette while my
room is done. Then meditation (there are no addresses of
any kind), and then write and read and so on till about 11.30,
when I go and pray again. Then dinner at 12, siesta
afterwards, walk in garden or an ilex avenue ; tea with an
English abbot at 4.30, then go about and meditate on
anything, and supper at 7.30 ; and bed about 10. A really
tranquil, peaceable day ; and I am loving every minute of
it. It lasts ten days. We talk a little, but not very much
— and meals are nearly always silent.

He foresees the priesthood only a month ahead. After
a few days for saying Mass '' at shrines," he proposes to
" tear home at once." (To India he wrote that in June he
should "return to England like a bullet from a gun; and
soak myself again in lawns and trees and puddly roads and
villages.") Meanwhile,

The Benedictines are really wonderful — so extraordin-
arily peaceful. They never fuss one, and radiate a sort
of tranquillity ; they walk and talk very slowly ; and their
ceremonial is amazing, with very deliberate, clear singing.
We have just had a perfectly splendid vespers, with the
Abbot Primate in cope and mitre — all very deliberate and
quiet. Oh dear ! I wonder whether Westminster Abbey
will ever see it again !

On May 28 he was ordained subdeacon in the Lateran
by Cardinal Respighi, the Vicar-General, with some
hundred others.

" Such sights and sounds," he writes to Mrs. Benson. . . .
" I am extraordinarily pleased to be a subdeacon at last ;
and the office is not a burden, and I do not think will be ;
it is wonderfully beautiful. Our retreat was almost perfect ;
the one flaw was the suspense, as we had to spend Friday
in telephoning and interviewing to make certain of the
next day. We are being very sharp with the authorities,
and have wearied them out like the Unjust Judge, and they
will give us anything we ask for, I think. They will have
to amend their proverb, and say ' Time is made for slaves
and Britons.' "

IN ROME 347

He is, meanwhile, back at San Silvestro, the heat being
fearful, all shutters closed, the courtyard full of swooping,
crying swifts. The green parrot nearly went off its head
with joy at seeing him again, and the cat too was " pleased
with him," and clawed his " fish all during supper ; [and
ate] the whole of the head and outlying parts of a sole,
except the backbone."

The diaconate was for Sunday, June 5, and was given
in the interior chapel of San Silvestro. The weather had,
anyhow, necessitated "retreat." Hugh had sat gasping,
in pyjamas, a hot, pale sky glaring through a canework
blind that made the trees and roof and sky look like bad
sampler-work. All the ceremony was extremely quiet;
"no music, no congregation." "Oh dear! how very
strange it all is ! But I needn't say how happy I am." *

His mother had already written to him :

I pray God to bless, with what fullness of desire it is
impossible to say, this taking up again of your Dedication,
this renewal of your priesthood in the Church of God.

And now that the date was practically fixed, she wrote :

I shall pray for you just this — the words you will be hear-
ing on Sunday. " Grant that his teaching may be a spiritual
remedy for God's people, and the fragrance of his life a
delight to the Church of God."

She had studied the august ordination ritual with such
accuracy that she knew it almost by heart ; and, under
the spell of its wide serenity, she was able to calm one
of his expressed fears. " I don't believe, whatever the
service on Sunday is, that it will be 'disturbing.' You
will be out of all that."

^ His one grief, he confessed, was that he would never enter a theatre again.
. . . He need not, it proved, have been so anxious.

348 ROBERT HUGH iBENSON

Hugh Benson was then ordained priest on the 12th
June, the third Sunday after Pentecost, in the same tiny
chapel opening out of the San Silvestro library.

S. Silvestro, /««(5 12.

My dear Mamma, — Well, it is just over ; and every-
body has gone — and we are extraordinarily happy.

Archbishop Stonor was ill, and couldn't come ; so
Archbishop Seton, a Scotchman, thin and tall, with a very
fine brown face, ordained us instead ; and it was all as
simple as possible : and lasted just over the hour. Then
everybody rushed up, and knelt down one by one to kiss
our hands and be blessed ; then we all went down to
breakfast about nine. There were half a dozen Englishmen,
priests and students, who assisted, and a congregation of
about a dozen more men, mostly laymen, with a Bene-
dictine and a Jesuit among them. Then people began to
give us presents. Then we all went up to our rooms and
TALKED. Then the post came, and your letter. Thank
you so much for it.

For myself, I feel just normal again, and that I am
what I am, because I couldn't imagine myself really any-
thing else. . . .

We failed to get leave for St. Peter's in time for to-
morrow : so I am saying mass in St. Gregory's, where St.
Augustine started from ; and on Tuesday in St. Priscilla's
catacomb, where St. Peter preached ; and on Wednesday
in St. Peter's — not at the altar of the choir — but over St.
Peter's body ; and on Thursday, very early before starting,
in S. Silvestro. . . . The journey will be ghastly — we leave
at 8 A.M., and travel through that awful heat.

By the way, I am bringing such vestments 1 old
ones that I bought second-hand in the market, and in
which I was ordained, all blazing with gold and flowers.
But I shall have to leave a good deal behind me — (prepare
Beth!) — to follow by sea, as I have accumulated such
a lot.

He mentions the sudden death of Abbot Raynal at
Sant' Anselmo, and exultingly concludes :

Best love to everyone. E. B. But I shall reach home
almost as soon as this letter !

IN ROME 349

He paid his farewell visits, then, to churches, to
monasteries, and to the Pope, and returned to England.

What had Rome given him ? There are elusive and
wistful Romes, underlying the flamboyant city of whatever
period, Romes pagan and papal, classical, mediaeval, and
even modern, which are shy to yield their secret, and
exact long intimacy or quite exceptional intuition on the
part of anyone who would woo it from them. Fr. Benson,
I think, never gave himself time to learn them ; and not
activity, however feverish, is the way to " tear the heart "
out of Rome. If, as the Latin poet sang, Rome made the
universe one city, it is as true that in the city is con-
tained a world, and worlds are hard to conquer. However,
he went back supplied for ever and for ever with a centre
of gravity. There never would be the slightest doubt,
henceforward, whither the eye was to turn, whence the
compelling voice should speak, or where the feet must
rest. Whatever Hugh Benson else might be, he never
now could be anything but a Roman Catholic. His
fearless eye and relentless judgment had appraised all
that was most natural and most human in that great
Sacrament of Rome and Papacy ; the more did he
exult in that manifestly Divine which there displayed itself :
and for him, now more than ever, all history, all psychology,
had but one adequate explanation, and this was to be found
in the Supernatural, which, through Rome's appointed
mediation, reached to man.

CHAPTER II
AT LLANDAFF HOUSE

... I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again !
For England's the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go ;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand.

Rupert Brooke.

The return journey from Lambeth to Cambridge via

Rome, as Mr. Shane Leslie has called it, was soon enough

to be accomplished, but with a halt at home. To Tremans

Hugh Benson hurried straight from San Silvestro, happy

to be where

" Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose ;
And where the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star."

He writes ecstatically to India on July 13 : He is
utterly happy here at home ; he bathes ; he lives in
flannels ; he says Mass.* There is a peacock and a dog ;
the sun shines ; there is a breeze, and breakfast takes
place out of doors, beneath a tree. ... He rows the
Protestant gardener for being drunk :

A religious interview, not magisterial ; but I hope we
both acquitted ourselves with credit. Such a nice man ;

1 His first Mass in England, and that on his last Corpus Christi, were said at
the Convent of the Canonesses Regular of St. Augustine at Hayward's Heath.
He was noted at once, the Prioress kindly tells me, for his " singular and un-
obtrusive gentleness."

3SO

/

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 351

and he only gets drunk about three times a year, and is a
furious teetotaller in between. I have great sympathy for
that kind of man.

Meanwhile an Elizabethan play is in prospect, with
the garden front of the house as scene. There is a priest-
hunt : lights are to flash to and fro in the windows ; a
capture is to take place on the roof. It was to represent
an incident in Wyatt's rebellion, Thomas Wyatt's cousin
having owned Tremans. " He walks there, head under
arm."

And apparently, at this period, Hugh Benson still knew
how to lounge. He wrote to the same correspondent
that

The world is divided into two classes — those who like
people, and those who like things. It has come to us as
a good classification, at home. My mother yearns con-
tinually for town, and loves eleven hundred people ; and
all the rest of us love the country, and cocks and hens,
and small events on the lawn like the dog digging a hole,
and discuss them as if they were the pivots on which
the world moved.

In this interspace of unmixed happiness, he began to
revise the proofs of By What Authority. As usual, the
mechanical labour caused the spirit to appear evaporated
from its pages as he read them.

On July 23, 1904, he wrote to Mr. A. C. Benson :

My proofs have become [begun] to arrive at last, of
my novel. They rather give the impression of " Hardly
had this unfortunate monarch " — and should be read in a
head voice by a man with pince-nez.

I have been revelling in Farrar, according to your
advice.^

^ He had an interleaved copy of Dean Farrar's Eric, or Little by Little,
which he had illustrated. I believe there was no mood of depression, were it
never so black, which he could not enlighten by the exquisite comedy to be

352 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

By his brother's advice, too, the charming dedication of
his book to Mrs. Benson, Miss M. Benson, and Miss Tait,
assumed its present Latin. It recalls this happy space at
home, in the company of " those Three, more than others
dear, at whose side I wrote this book, in whose ears I read
it, and at whose schooling I corrected it." This novel,
both as the firstfruits of his Catholic life, and on many
intrinsic titles, is so unique that to my thinking it deserves
a full attention.

In October, 1904, Dom Bede Camm finished reading
the proofs, and persuaded Benson to alter the title Magnus
Valde, not to be understanded of the multitude, into the
familiar By What Authority,

He wanted, too, an appendix which should show Isabel
in her Bridgetine convent, for example, in Belgium.
Benson, however, who still more than half intended her
to marry Mr. Buxton and provide descendants who should
people the Charles II novel, refused.

Dom Bede has written to me concerning their united
attempt to divest the romance of those minute historical
flaws whose entire elimination, to judge by famous ex-
amples in historical novelists, is all but impossible.

We did our best, and I think that there are few in-
accuracies that matter. It is true that almost on the first
page I let pass a passage about " the bustle of the Brighton
Road," which of course was a terrible anachronism in
Elizabethan times, but none of the reviewers seem to have
discovered it. We found it out as soon as the book was
finished ! But no one who has not tried has any idea
how difficult it is to make a historical romance accurate
in detail. I remember R. H. B. telling me that he had just

detected in those pages. It was to him more than the waters in a dry land which
so many draw from the " Alice " books. He also had a similarly illustrated copy of
Bishop Welldon's Gerald Eversley's Friendship, a book written, however, in
an hour of depression and sickness, which neither claims nor possesses the
eternal qualities of Eric,

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 353

discovered that Scotch firs were introduced into England
only under James I. And he had made his hero ride for
miles under the Scotch firs in Sussex ! ^

The story forms itself chiefly round two characters,
Anthony and Isabel Norris. With their gentle Puritan
father they live in the Dower House of Great Keynes, a
Sussex village in the rich scenery Benson knew by heart.
The Hall is Catholic. Sir Nicholas Maxwell lives there
with his wife and Mistress Margaret Torridon, a nun long
since expelled from her convent ; and of his two sons,
the elder, James, is a priest, though secretly, and the gay,
unheeding Hubert will succeed to the estate. Now, into
their lives religion brings a sword, and brings salvation.
For Anthony and Isabel, by separate paths, will come to
Rome — Isabel, just as her lover Hubert has brought him-
self to fancy that the religion of " all good sea-dogs " (for
he goes a-buccaneering), of the Queen's Grace, and, above
all, of Isabel, is true, and embraces the Reform.

The tale can be read in different ways.

Legitimately, if you will, you may follow it as Hugh's
own history. " You know," his mother wrote, " OF course
you are Anthony. Only, I cannot have you racked ! "
Anthony passes from the horses and dogs and hawks of
his home to Cambridge, careless yet and unawakened.
" He represents," wrote Benson in his notes, "the external ;
his inner life develops late ; cetat. 23." " Ecclesiast.," he
adds, abbreviating, "develops at Cambridge." It was
there, he means, that the vision of a Church, unguessed in
the individualist Puritanism of his home, first dawned for
him. (Not such was Hugh's home ; still it was at Cam-

* There were one or two other slips : Anthony before Elizabeth has blue eyes ;
later, I fear, they are brown ! But Benson is not the only artist whose faculty of
consistent visualisation suffers these periodical lapses.

I Z

354 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

bridge, not at Addington, that " theology " revealed him to
himself.) Theological chatter indeed, and a parody of the
Mass, disgust him. But the gallant spectacle of England,
England awakening, England adolescent, stretching her
muscles, flinging wide her independent enterprise, creates
a complementary vision — the National Church, august in
wealth and dignity and royal favour, England seen as
spiritual, "the religious voice of the nation that was be-
ginning to make itself so dominant in the council of the
world." In fine rhetoric, only too modern, Anthony will
preach that Nationalism to his Catholic friend Buxton.
Meanwhile he sees it the closer, and its mechanism, as
Gentleman of the Horse at Lambeth, in the Archbishop's
household, a post received after a wasted year or two
following upon Cambridge. But there, disillusioned gradu-
ally by the underside of all that State religion, the sight of
the sordid machinery, the Court intrigue, the cynic sacrifice
not of men's lives alone, but of truth and honour and the
spirit for the better establishment of the Throne, he realises
that England, having hacked herself free from the Conti-
nent, has severed too the bands which linked her with the
supernatural. The Authority of Elizabeth, the ideal of
England, confront those of Christ. He is the readier for
Mr. Buxton's "puffing away" of the national ideal, and
his substitution of the Catholic.

As Anthony rode back alone in the evening sunlight,
he was as one who was seeing a vision. There was indeed
a vision before him, that had been taking shape gradually,
detail by detail, during these last months, and ousting the
old one, and which now, terribly emphasized by Campion's
arguments and illuminated by the fire of his personality,
towered up imperious, consistent, dominating — and across
her brow her title, the Catholic Church, Far above all the
melting cloudland of theory she moved, a stupendous fact ;
living, in contrast with the dead past to which her enemies

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 355

cried in vain ; eloquent when other systems were dumb ;
authoritative when they hesitated ; steady when they reeled
and fell. About her throne dwelt her children, from every
race and age, secure in her protection, and wise with her
knowledge, when other men faltered and questioned and
doubted. And as Anthony looked up and saw her for the
first time, he recognised her as the Mistress and Mother
of his soul ; and although the blinding clouds of argument
and theory and self-distrust rushed down on him again
and filled his eyes with dust, yet he knew he had seen her
face in very truth, and that the memory of that vision
could never again wholly leave him.

Fact after fact proves to him that his worshipped
empire is not even Caesar's, but that of Caesar's freedmen.
Asking, To whom, then, shall we go ? he " drearily " submits
to his day's "strife of tongues." The theories of Nicholl,
Jewell, Harding, Rastall clash around him. Buxton's
brilliant logic buffets him. The pathetic pleading of the
courteous old Archbishop (Benson "fell in love" with
Grindal) cannot help him ; though Anthony, like Hugh,
submits to farewell "interviews." More subversive of his
peace than any talk, has been the gallant spectacle of
Campion's death ; above all, the hideous plot, concocted
by an ex-retainer of the Maxwells, Lackington, the Judas
of the story. Anthony himself is tricked into betraying
James Maxwell, who, caught at Mass, is tortured to death's
door. Grace calls ; at Buxton's house he makes, under
Parsons, the "spiritual exercises," and passes from the
Tyranny into the Kingdom.

The coincidences of Hugh's pilgrimage and Anthony's
are admitted. I would argue that in Isabel's tale, too, are
elements not alien to Hugh's. While, on the one hand, her
psychology is boyish often enough, or (if you will) what a
boy thinks a girl's psychology to be, so in Hugh were certain
rare feminine qualities revealed, chiefly in his intuitional

356 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

and passionate processes. Observe first, in Isabel, that
personal, indeed romantic " love of Jesus " which was
John Inglesant's and Hugh's, which made certain spots in
lane or garden "sacred and fragrant to her because her
Lord had met her there." Jesus was as real as Anthony or
Hubert ; His love made a third with theirs. From this
" intense individualism " a visit to London and the stately
worship of St. Paul's lifts her, as Hugh was partly lifted,
into the world of corporate religion. A sojourn at that
miniature Geneva, Northampton, reveals to her at once
the best of Calvin's Church, and the horror of his Christ,
helpless as His Father beneath the Eternal Decree which
damned beforehand "poor timid, despairing, hoping souls" ;
more inflexible even than Michael Angelo's great Judge,
who at least chooses to hurl his thunder-bolt. Through the
thunder came no human voice, and, bruised in spirit,
broken too (by her father's sudden death) in heart, Isabel
returned to the Dower House, where Mistress Margaret
came to mother her. Logic of intellect and force of facts
buffeted Anthony Homewards. Infinite tenderness and
terrible pain were to remodel his sister's soul. Isabel,
like Hugh, must come to the Church " as a child." The
old nun's schooling, best shown on the gentle page where
she explains the Rosary, reveals to Isabel the heavenly
Mother she had not dared to long for ; in sweet simplicity
she moves towards the paramount Obedience. Yet might
sweetness not suffice. Pain works the fuller miracle.^

* Pain is a motif in Benson's life and writing. Sounded in the " Bridge " and
the " Dyed Garments " of The Light Invisible, it reaches full development in Initia-
tion and Loneliness. Anthony must not lack it. He sees it as it were incarnate
in James Maxwell's racked body ; there is a paragraph charged with intense
feeling, where, on entering the dark and silent Hall, Anthony knows that, in
some room or other there, that living Crucifix is awaiting him — an adequate
answer, in itself, to the lusty argument of all-triumphant England ; and at home,
finally, in his own body, Pain will set the spirit free.

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 357

She has had her moment of triumph : Hubert (still nomin-
ally a Catholic) has declared himself ; he has kissed her
hands ; they are transfigured for her and glowing, not
with the firelight before which she holds them up, but
with an inner consecrated flame. The Divine Lover fades
and faints. Her heart knows itself "desperately weak"
towards Hubert. ... A fallen log rouses her. Her vision
is confused. Is it this love of Hubert which draws her
towards his Church ? Tortured into sleeplessness, she seeks
the old nun's bedside almost in despair. A scene of most
accurate psychology follows her conflict and foresees her
victory. Hubert will apostatise to win her ; then she will
have none of him. Later on, she will be called by Christ
to renounce the truer love of Buxton, in his turn on his
knees to her, and, last of all, Anthony's, beside whose death
she sits. At the solemn end, as at the naive beginning, it
is the exclusive " love of Jesus " which claims her. But
with the cruel human pain entered the supreme joys of
grace, felt when she, with Anthony, were received into the
Church and made their first Communion.

I make no apology for quoting these long pages, in
which Benson's rhetoric, charged with passion, rises
highest. Only one other picture of that Mass which so
supremely " mattered " should, I fancy, be compared
with this — Newman's, in Loss and Gain, During the
night the promised morrow had haunted the girl's sleep.

The night passed on. Once Isabel awoke, and saw
her windows blue and mystical and her room full of a
dim radiance from the bright night outside. It was
irresistible, and she sprang out of bed and went to the
window across the cool polished oak floor, and leaned
with her elbows on the sill, looking out at the square of
lawn and the low ivied wall beneath, and the tall trees
rising beyond, ashen-grey and olive-black, in the brilliant

358 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

glory that poured down from almost directly overhead, for
the Paschal moon was at its height above the house.

And then suddenly the breathing silence was broken
by a ripple of melody, and another joined, and another ;
and Isabel looked and wondered and listened, for she
had never heard before the music of the mysterious night-
flight of the larks, all soaring and singing together when
the rest of the world is asleep. And she listened and
wondered as the stream of song poured down from the
wonderful spaces of the sky, rising to far-off ecstasies as
the wheeling world sank yet further, with its sleeping
meadows and woods, beneath the whirling singers ; and
then the earth for a moment turned in its sleep as Isabel
listened, and the trees stirred as one deep breath came
across the woods, and a thrush murmured a note or two
beside the drive, and a rabbit suddenly awoke in the
field and ran on to the lawn and sat up and looked at
the white figure at the window ; and far away, from the
direction of Lindlield, a stag brayed.*

" So longeth my soul," whispered Isabel to herself.

Then all grew still again ; the trees hushed ; the
torrent of music, more tumultuous as it neared the earth,
suddenly ceased ; and Isabel at the window leaned
further out, and held her hands in the bath of light,
and spoke softly into the night :

" O Lord Jesus, how kind Thou art to me 1 "

Then, at last, the morning came, and Christ was risen
beyond a doubt.

Just before the sun came up, when all the sky was
luminous to meet him, the two again passed up and
round the corner, and into the little door in the angle.
There was the same shaded candle or two, for the house
was yet dark within ; and they passed up and on together
through the sitting-room into the chapel where each had
made a first confession the night before, and had together
been received into the Catholic Church. Now it was all
fragrant with flowers and herbs ; a pair of tall lilies leaned
their delicate heads towards the altar, as if to listen for
the soundless coming in the name of the Lord ; underfoot,

^ On the 27th June 1905, he wrote to Mr. Rolfe: "Do you know the
glorious hour when the world turns in her sleep and sighs, and the cocks crow,
and cows get up and lie down again ? I lay awake till nearly three o'clock this
morning, and heard it all happen. Sometimes all the larks soar and sing together
at the same time."

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 359

all about the altar, lay sprigs of sweet herbs, rosemary,
thyme, lavender, bay-leaves, with white blossoms scattered
over them — a soft carpet for the Pierced Feet, not like
those rustling palm-swords over which He rode to death
last week. The black oak chest that supported the altar-
stone was glorious in its vesture of cloth-of-gold ; and
against the white-hung wall at the back, behind the silver
candlesticks, leaned the gold plate of the house, to do
honour to the King. And presently there stood there
the radiant rustling figure of the Priest, his personality
sheathed and obliterated beneath the splendid symbolism
of his vestments, stiff and chinking with jewels as he
moved.

The glorious Mass of Easter Day began.

" Immolatus est Christus ; itaque epulemur," Saint
Paul cried from the south corner of the altar to the two
converts. (" Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us ;
therefore let us keep the feast, but not with the old
leaven.")

" Quis revolvet nobis lapidem ? " wailed the women.
("Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the
sepulchre ? ")

"And when they looked," cried the triumphant Evan-
gelist, "they saw that the stone was rolled away; for it
was very great " — " erat quippe magnus valde."

The superb procession moves forward — the trumpets
of the Gloria, and the tramp of the Credo, and the
proclamation of eternal life, for which earthly life may
well be sacrificed.

The heralds passed on, and mysterious figures came
next, bearing Melchisedec's gifts, shadowing the tre-
mendous event that follows on behind.

After a space or two came the first lines of the body-
guard, the heavenly creatures dimly seen moving through
clouds of glory. Angels, Dominations, Powers, Heavens,
Virtues, and blessed Seraphim, all crying out together
to heaven and earth to welcome Him who comes after
in the bright shadow of the Name of the Lord ; and the
trumpets peal out for the last time, " Hosanna in the
highest ! "

Then a hush fell, and presently in the stillness came

36o ROBERT HUGH BENSON

riding the great Personages who stand in heaven about
the Throne : first, the Queen Mother herself, glorious
within and without, moving in clothing of wrought gold,
high above all others ; then the great Princes of the
Blood Royal, who are admitted to drink of the King's
own Cup, and sit beside Him on their thrones, Peter
and Paul and the rest, with rugged faces and scarred
hands ; and with them great mitred figures — Linus, Cletus,
and Clement, with their companions.

And then another space and a tingling silence ; the
crowds bow down like corn before the wind ; the far-off
trumpets are silent ; and He comes, He comes !

On He moves, treading underfoot the laws He has
made, yet borne up by them as on the Sea of Galilee ;
He who inhabits eternity at an instant is made present ;
He who transcends space is immanent in material kind ;
He who never leaves the Father's side rests on His white
linen carpet, held, yet unconfined, in the midst of the
little gold things and embroidery and candle-flames and
lilies, while the fragrance of the herbs rises about Him.
There rests the gracious King. Before this bending group
the rest of the pageant dies into silence and nothingness
outside the radiant circle of His Presence. There is His
immediate priest-herald, who has marked out this halting-
place for the Prince, bowing before Him, striving by
gestures to interpret and fulfil the silence that words
must always leave empty. Here, behind, are the adoring
human hearts, each looking with closed eyes into the
Face of the Fairest of the children of men, each crying
silently words of adoration, welcome, and utter love.

The moments pass. The Court ceremonies are per-
formed. The Virgins that follow the Lamb — Felicitas,
Perpetua, Agatha, and the rest — step forward smiling,
and take their part ; the Eternal Father is invoked again in
the Son's own words ; and at length the King, descending
yet one further step of infinite humility, flings back the
last vesture of His outward Royalty, and casts Himself ii;i
a passion of haste and desire into the still and invisible
depths of these two quivering hearts, made in His own
Image, that lift themselves in an agony of love to meet
Him. . . .

Meanwhile the Easter morning is deepening outside,
the sun is rising above the yew hedge, and the dew flashes
drop by drop into a diamond and vanishes ; the thrush

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 361

that stirred and murmured last night is pouring out his
song, and the larks that rose into the moonlight are
running to and fro in the long meadow grass. The tall
slender lilies that have not been chosen to grace the
Sacramental Presence-Chamber are at least in the King's
own garden, where he walks, morning and evening, in the
cool of the day, and waiting for those who will have seen
Him face to face. . . .

And presently they come, the tall lad and his sister,
silent and together, out into the radiant sunlight ; and the
joy of the morning and the singing thrush and the jewels
of dew and the sweet swaying lilies are shamed and put to
silence by the joy upon their faces and in their hearts.

Considered as a story, doubtless the book is overloaded
and episodic. Benson, you feel, wanted to pack into it all
he knew and felt about the period in which his life was, at
that crisis, being lived. And that is true ; he always felt
he would never write another book. All, then, must be
spoken now.'^ Thus the Mary Stuart and the Campion
pages are episodes, easily detached, especially the former.
But Benson had fallen irrevocably under the spell of both

^ Lord Halifax wrote to him on March 20, 1905, about this book :"...!
thought at first that the characters were a little too much pegs on which
to hang certain opinions, and to exemplify certain facts, and that here and
there the thoughts were the thoughts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
not those of the fifteenth and sixteenth. It was correct, perfectly impartial ;
there was not a statement or an utterance for which there was not authority ;
and yet somehow the story seemed to have been written backwards — the con-
clusions and moral first, then the story. . . . No one can read Waverley, Rob
Roy, and Old Mortality without becoming Jacobite, but that as the result of
the story— it is not the story that has been developed out of Jacobite principles."
I would suggest that neither did Hugh here sit down, as it were, to adorn a
moral by a tale, but that having his brain simply seething with innumerable
visions — visions of a history seen, of course, under a certain light, in a certain
perspective — he could not but utter them. They tumbled forth pell-mell,
one after the other, rather than fused — for fusion, he left himself no time.
Hence the appearance of a "doctrine illustrated by examples," as they said
in the old books. His characters are often "types" {e.g. Parson Dent and
his wife), but that is less because they arc invented to incarnate a notion than
because, vividly perceived, they at once cease to be just themselves, but stand
for something further, and become significant. Thus Benson's mind always
worked. Artistically, he does not disguise the process sufficiently.

362 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

these personalities, as all must who come really close to
them. Therefore the scenes at Bolton Castle and Fother-
ingay were inevitable, though not really in place, as are
those in Come Rack, Come Rope^ and though the trial and
death of Campion influences Anthony, yet his brilliant
logic is " duplicated " by Buxton's, his martyrdom by
Maxwell's torture. Again, is not the charming chapter
upon " Northern Religion " an unwarrantable interlude ?
An interlude, certainly, in the story, but warrantable, I
think, as completing the picture of England. From
Mirfield, Hugh had made excursions all over that faithful
North, and had grown to love the "greens of its windy
villages " ; the stony towns of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and
up to Westmorland ; the uncompromising Halls, the
bleak, unwelcoming fells, where hearts were yet so warmly
loyal and tenacious of tradition. When he wanted to know
what was the old faith of England, Lancashire could cer-
tainly show it to his appraising eye, and he was grateful,
and here was his debt paid. Apart from this, the story
moves dramatically, especially around the capture of James
Maxwell and the death of Mary Corbet.* And it is full —
like the world, where " plots " are rare, but personalities
abound — of " characters." Benson's humour was to be-
come for the most part mordant ; here, how gently he
laughs at old Sir Nicholas, with his Catholic yet most
" Evangelical " piety, his love of shrewd intrigue, and his
childlike innocence.

Often Benson shows us a chivalrous and tender aflfec-

' Benson was again and again implored to write the decisive romance of
Mary Queen of Scots. He trembled to touch it. He agreed with Mr. Maurice
Hewlett, author of The Queen^s Quhair, which he admired, that the " other
woman " in Mary's case was not Queen Elizabeth, but Lady Bothwell.

- Melodramatically, even ; as when, to the question, Who captained the
English ship, which, after such massacre and sacrilege, took the Spanish ship?
comes the answer, '* Hubert Maxwell."

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 363

tion for old ladies. Some have resented this, as though he
could not let himself love women till he could pity them.
Still, it gave us Lady Maxwell and her sister, types subtly
different, though each of them so great a lady. Benson
loved that velvet graciousness, and lace-like delicacy, and
dignity of silver hair and jewels. Lady Maxwell is magni-
ficent, and tender ; as when she quells her village folk,
furious with the parson's bitter wife, who had betrayed
the priest lodging in the Hall ; and then nurses and indeed
converts the panic-stricken woman. And with these two
put Mary Corbet, the ^^incomparable" Mary Corbet, as a
conspiracy (one would think) of critics always names her,
in her peacock gowns or rosy silks or muslins, with her
clouds of coal-black hair, her flashing hands and restless
wit and banter and court graces, and with a heart as pure
and loyal and detached as ever was Isabel's. Yet Benson
knew no "Mary Corbet" to inspire that picture, which
is separate in this book, so unneeded by the story, so
justified in itself ! His vision of her must have been no
less clear-cut and distinct and finished, and he never quite
reproduced her. For transition to what I hold to be
the true essence of the book, take Hubert Maxwell, the
supplanter of James Maxwell, the buccaneer with Drake.
How boyishly Benson exults in these tales of blood and
gunpowder, and how headlong is the rush of his story of
Drake's knighting, and how high its colour ! How ade-
quately this apostate for the sake of the pride of life and
lust of eyes, symbolises, for Benson, that wanton, cruel,
laughing England, intent on strangling the Spirit with her
vigorous young hands. How Hubert dwindles, when
arraigned before his mother and before the aged nun ;
how he shrivels, while she remains serene, so utterly her-
self. And how horrible is that hour of reaction, of lowered

364 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

vitality, when he sits in the Hall, now decatholicised and
with all the soul struck out of it, while in his loneliness the
sinister ghost peers at his soul, and the surmise : What,
after all, if the Roman Church were true ? Benson, like
Newman, had been haunted by that ghost, and with the
dawn welcomed the substance ; for Hubert unreality re-
mained triumphant, and still, at the end, we cannot tell
whether the night is to break again for him.

But in Hubert and Anthony, Benson really teaches that,
as in the jEneid it is Rome, not ^Eneas, who is " hero "
and gives the piece its unity, so here the supreme factor
is a City ; or, if you will, that the two cities which Augustine
saw, eternally opposed, God's and the world's, were here
and now for him incarnated in Rome and England. Ben-
son's panegyric of England throughout is quite superb.
To the full he realises the magnificence of her dawn and
the promise of her sun. And this England was in her
turn incarnate in Elizabeth. At Cambridge, Anthony first
saw Elizabeth ; then, her presence scarcely led him be-
yond itself. Later, from a balcony in Cheapside, brother
and sister watch her progress. Gorgeously the rapid prose
paints the procession — a pomp of royalty preceded,
though, by that scourged man, writhing at the cart's tail,
his back one red wound, yelled and laughed at by the
crowd like any of those " scourged fools " of ancient days
in Syria or in Egypt. He passed, and Anthony saw the
Queen.

A figure of extraordinary dignity, sitting upright and
stiff like a pagan idol, dressed in a magnificent and fantas-
tic purple robe, with a great double ruff, like a huge collar,
behind her head ; a long taper waist, voluminous skirts
spread all over the cushions, embroidered with curious
figures and creatures. Over her shoulders, but opened in

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 365

front so as to show the rope of pearls and the blaze of
jewels on the stomacher, was a purple velvet mantle lined
with ermine, with pearls sewn into it here and there. Set
far back on her head, over a pile of yellow-reddish hair
drawn tightly back from the forehead, was a hat with
curled brims, elaborately embroidered, with the jewelled
outline of a Httle crown in front, and a high feather top-
ping all.

And her face — a long oval, pale and transparent in
complexion, with a sharp chin and a high forehead, high
arched eyebrows, auburn, but a little darker than her hair ;
her mouth was small, rising at the corners, with thin
curved lips tightly shut ; and her eyes, which were clear
in colour, looked incessantly about her with great liveliness
and good-humour.

There was something overpowering to these two
children who looked, too awed to cheer, on this formidable
figure in the barbaric dress, the gorgeous climax of a
gorgeous pageant. Apart from the physical splendour,
this solitary glittering creature represented so much — it
was the incarnate genius of the laughing, brutal, wanton
English nation, that sat here in the gilded carriage and
smiled and glanced with tight lips and clear eyes. She
was like some emblematic giant, moving in a processional
car, as fantastic as itself, dominant and serene above the
heads of the maddened crowds, on to some mysterious
destiny. A sovereign, however personally inglorious, has
such a dignity in some measure ; and Elizabeth added to
this an exceptional majesty of her own. Henry would not
have been ashamed for this daughter of his. What wonder,
then, that these crowds were delirious with love and loyalty
and an exultant fear, as this overwhelming personality
went by — this pale-faced, tranquil virgin Queen, passionate,
wanton, outspoken, and absolutely fearless ; with a suffi-
cient reserve of will to be fickle without weakness, and
sufficient grasp of her aims to be indifferent to her policy,
untouched by vital religion, financially shrewd, inordi-
nately vain. And when this strange dominant creature,
royal by character as by birth, as strong as her father
and as wanton as her mother, sat in ermine and velvet
and pearls in a royal carriage, with shrewd-faced wits, and
bright-eyed lovers, and solemn statesmen, and great nobles,
vacuous and gallant, glittering and jingling before her,
and troops of tall ladies in ruff and crimson mantle riding

^66 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

on white horses behind ; and when the fanfares went
shattering down the street, vibrating through the continuous
roar of the crowd and the shrill cries of children and the
mellow thunder of church bells rocking overhead, and the
endless tramp of a thousand feet below ; and when the
whole was framed in this fantastic, twisted street, blazing
with tapestries and arched with gables and banners, all
bathed in glory by the clear frosty sunshine, it is little
wonder that for a few minutes at least this country boy
felt that here at last was the incarnation of his dreams,
and that his heart should exult with an enthusiasm he
could not interpret, for the cause of a people who could
produce such a Queen, and of a Queen who could rule
such a people ; and that his imagination should be fired
with a sudden sense that these were causes for which the
sacrifice of a life would be counted cheap, if they might
thereby be furthered.

Yet in this very moment, by one of those mysterious
suggestions that rise from the depth of a soul, the image
passed into his mind, and poised itself there for an instant,
of the grey-haired man who had passed half an hour
ago sobbing and shrinking at the cart's tail.

Again he saw her, when he had appealed to Caesar for
the life of James Maxwell and had won his boon. That
night he witnessed the revels of the English goddess, and
here still the contrast stirred his soul :

There across the rippling of lutes from the ladies in the
next room, in slow, swaying measure, with the gentle tap
of a drum now and again ; and the pavane began a stately,
dignified dance ; and among all the ladies moved the
great Queen herself, swaying and bending with much
grace and dignity. It was the strangest thing for Anthony
to find himself here, a raven among all these peacocks
and birds of paradise ; and he wondered at himself and
at the strange humour of Providence, as he watched the
shimmer of the dresses, and the sparkle of the shoes and
jewels, and the soft clouds- of muslin and lace that shivered
and rustled as the ladies stepped ; the firelight shone
through the wide doorway on this glowing movement, and
groups of candles in sconces within the room increased
and steadied the soft intensity of the light. The soft ting-

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 367

ling instruments, with the slow tap-tap marking the
measure like a step, seemed a translation into chord and
melody of this stately tender exercise. And so this glorious
flower-bed, loaded too with a wealth of essences in the
dresses and the sweet-washed gloves, swayed under the
wind of the music, bending and rising together in slow
waves and ripples. Then it ceased ; and the silence was
broken by a quick storm of applause while the dancers
waited for the lutes. Then all the instruments broke out
together in quick triple time ; the stringed instruments
supplying a hasty, throbbing accompaniment, while the
shrill flutes began to whistle and the drums to gallop ; —
there was yet a pause in the dance, till the Queen made
the first movement ; — and then the whole whirled off on
the wings of a coranto.

It was bewildering to Anthony, who had never even
dreamed of such a dance before. He watched first the
lower line of the shoes and the whole floor, in reality
above, and in the mirror of the polished boards below,
seemed scintillating in lines of diamond light ; the heavy
underskirts of brocade, puffed satin, and cloth of gold,
with glimpses of foamy lace beneath, whirled and tossed
above these flashing vibrations. Then he looked at the
higher strata, and there was a tossing sea of faces and
white throats, borne up, as it seemed — now revealed, now
hidden — on clouds of undulating muslin and lace, with
sparkles of precious stones set in ruffs and wings and on
high-piled hair.

As Anthony went down the square winding staircase
an hour later, when the evening was over, and the keen
winter air poured up to meet him, his brain was throbbing
with the madness of dance and music and whirling colour.
Here, it seemed to him, lay the secret of life. For a few
minutes his old day-dreams came back, but in more in-
toxicating dress. The figure of Mary Corbet in her rose-
coloured silk and her clouds of black hair, and her jewels
and her laughing eyes and scarlet mouth, and her violet
fragrance and her fire — this dominated the boy. As he
walked towards the stables across the starlit court, she
seemed to move before him, to hold out her hands to him,
to call him her own dear lad ; to invite him out of the
drab-coloured life that lay on all sides, behind and before,

368 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

up into a mystic region of jewelled romance, where he and
she would live and be one in the endless music of rippling
strings and shrill flutes and the maddening tap of a little
hidden drum.

But the familiar touch of his own sober suit and the
creaking saddle as he rode home to Lambeth, and the icy
wind that sang in the river sedges, and the wholesome
smell of the horse and the touch of coarse hair at the
shoulder, talked and breathed the old Puritan common-
sense back to him again. That warm-painted, melodious
world he had left was gaudy nonsense ; and dancing was
not the same as living ; and Mary Corbet was not just a
rainbow on the foam that would die when the sun went
in ; but both she and he together were human souls, re-
deemed by the death of the Saviour, with His work to do,
and no time or energy for folly ; and James Maxwell in
the Tower — thank God, however, not for long — James
Maxwell, with his wrenched joints and forehead and lips
wet with agony, was in the right ; and that lean, bitter,
furious woman in the purple and pearls, who supped to
the blare of trumpets and danced to the ripple of lutes,
wholly and utterly and eternally in the wrong.

Last of all he saw Elizabeth, when, a priest, he chose
the rack, death, and the service of the Kingdom rather
than liberty and life at the conditions of her tyranny.
He had his wish, and lay dying in the Tower in Isabel's
arms.

As she knelt and watched him, her thoughts circled
continually in little flights ; to the walled garden of the
Dower House in sunshine, and Anthony running across
it in his brown suit, with the wallflowers behind him
against the old red bricks and ivy, and the tall chestnut
rising behind ; to the wind-swept hills, with the thistles
and the golden-rod, and the hazel thickets, and Anthony
on his pony, sunburnt and voluble, hawk on wrist, with
a light in his eyes ; to the warm, panelled hall in winter,
with the tapers on the round table, and Anthony flat on
his face, with his feet in the air before the hearth, that
glowed and roared up the wide chimney behind, and his
chin on his hands, and a book open before him ; or,
farther back even still, to Anthony's little room at the

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 369

top of the house, his clothes on a chair, and the boy him-
self sitting up in bed with his arms round his knees as
she came in to wish him good night and talk to him a
minute or two. And every time the circling thought came
home and settled again on the sight of that still, straight
figure lying on the mattress, against the discoloured bricks,
with the light of the taper glimmering on his thin face and
brown hair and beard ; and every time her heart consented
that this was the best of all.

The day dawned, and the city gradually awoke. An-
thony opened his eyes. She was reading the Gospel for
Easter Sunday. As she spoke the words, " Magnus valde "
when the great stone was rolled away, Anthony died.
Isabel went out, after a while, through the keen and cloud-
less October sunrise. As she stood there by the Thames,
the Judas, Lackington, who had thus triply given Christ
over to His enemies, passed by, and would salute her,
but she never saw him. "She turned almost immediately
. . . and as she went the day deepened above her."

Such is the romance into which Benson poured his
own life as he had lived it hitherto. It contains, perhaps, all
his usual brilliance, and more, I feel, than his usual ten-
derness. It is as a record of his efforts and of his joys that
I have spoken of it so fully.

It was felt, as might without difficulty have been fore-
seen, that so swiftly ordained a priest must still pause
before he ventured into the uncertain seas of ministry.
A house for his further studies was being sought, and the
old epigram, originally launched at the neophyte-priest,
H. E. Manning, was rehearsed. Father Benson, people
murmured with sage nods, having been ordained priest,
is about to proceed to Cambridge to commence his
theology.

For upon Cambridge the combined choice of Hugh and
I 2 A

370 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

of Authority had fallen, and thither in October he repaired,
not to the Catholic rectory, but to Llandaff House (singular
coincidence of names : the house was built by Bishop
Watson of Llandaff, who occupied himself with a professor-
ship at Cambridge), inhabited by Mgr. Barnes, a fellow
Etonian and an Oxford man, afterwards a lieutenant of
the R.F.A., and Catholic chaplain at the University. The
front of this house projects almost exactly opposite to
the University Arms Hotel, and the garden at its back
stretches away to the grounds of Downing College.

Hugh was of course enchanted with the house and its
" big, high rooms with curved corners, &c."

" I have," he writes on October 23, " a large room
looking on to the street, and am very comfortable in all
ways ; it is very odd to be here.

" It was a heavenly time at Tremans."

Within the house Hugh lay, so to put it, very low.
'' We breakfasted separately," Mgr. Barnes writes to me,
"after our respective Masses; and he then retired to his
room, and only emerged for meals and a constitutional."

He was engaged in studying theology in the morn-
ings, and during the afternoons he wrote, and in the
evenings insisted on reading the day's work aloud to
his host, who was not always very encouraging. . . .
More congenial were his discussions as to which gem
in Farrar's Eric best deserved illustration (for it was
now that he drew most of these), and on the whole this
unacademic comradeship served to lay the ghosts he
created for himself by the writing of the Mirror of
Shalott. He would often appear, all his nerves on edge
with his own inventions : " I cannot b-b-ear to be alone,"
he would exclaim.

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 371

However, he soon picked up the threads of ordinary
life, and writing now became for him an integral part
of this.

October 31.

I began Moral Theology this morning, and finished
the Henry VIII book on Saturday. Isbister says that the
devotional book will be out this week ; and By What
Authority by November 15. Now I am starting to revise
the Charles II one.

Of the Henry VIII book something will be said in a
moment ; the devotional book is, of course, the Book of the
Love of Jesus.

November 6.

Nothing at all has happened — but it is a delightful
life, and I am beginning to make acquaintances among
the undergraduates, and dine and lunch a good deal,
and have also started Moral Theology, and really find
that I remember it pretty well.

I go to King's a good lot, and mumble superstitiously
in the ante-chapel ; but people are very nice.

He rejoins the Decemviri club (which met, on one
occasion, which felt strange to him, in his old rooms at
Trinity), and, writes Mr. A. C. Benson, '< One of the
members of that time has since told me that he was the
only older man he had ever known who really mixed with
undergraduates and debated with them on absolutely equal
terms. But indeed, so far as looks went, though he was
now thirty-four, he might almost have been an under-
graduate himself." ^

Besides this, he frequents the Pitt Club, and heads many
of his letters with its name ; also he joined the Musical

* Mr. A. C. Benson has, too, the following anecdote :

" I remember that we entered the room together when dining with a hospit-
able Master, and were introduced to a guest, to his bewilderment, as * Mr.
Benson ' and ' Father Benson.' ' I must explain,' said our host, ' that Father
Benson is not Mr. Benson's father ! ' 'I should have imagined that he might
be his son ! ' said the guest."

372 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Society, and other similar associations, which enables him
rather naively to remark on November 15 :

It is heavenly here — exactly the sort of life one likes —
except that there is not time to write very many books.

The King^s Achievement was by now, however, an
accomplished fact.

On October 31 he wrote to Mrs. Benson that the Henry
VIII book was finished. In November 1904 he read it
through to " Christopher Dell " ^ and decided that it was
a great advance upon By What Authority, being so much
better put together. And on February 13 he wrote to his
mother, to whom he had sent the book : " I know it is not
so effective in the last scene as in Anthony's death, but
I think it may be partly owing to the fact that one hasn't
the same sympathy with Ralph."

This he continued to feel about the book, and wrote on
November 6, 1905, to his friend Mr. F. Rolfe :

The only reason why I am entirely ill at ease about The
Kings Achievement is that it doesn't represent really any
part of my being. Not one of the characters is my
intimate friend. Now in my other books they are — the
whole lot. ... I have looked at them, not written them.
Do you see ?

He considered, too, that he had produced the book
much too fast.

His sister, Miss M. Benson, wrote on November 20 that
she had re-read The King^s Achievement aloud.

" I do think," she concludes, " it is a much better book
than I had remembered. It's beautifully written, a pleasure
to read, and either you have improved it very much in
concentration or it was not so invertebrate as I thought.
Still, it's not so engaging as the others, though Beatrice is

* The hero of The Sentimentalists, infra, Vol. II., p. 47 sqq.

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 373

really very fine indeed, and really I do give you credit
for understanding the way in which women can be friends.
So few people do understand, and I can't remember any
man, a novelist, who does.

" Beth," she continues, " wished me to say that she
thought some of the people were very unkind and crewel ;
but sometimes they were very kind and loving, and alto-
gether it ended better than she expected ; but she does wish
you'd write a book about people who were less disagreeable
with one another."

Poor Beth was haunted by the " crewelty " of Hugh's
personages. She pursued Miss Benson quite a long time
afterwards, and repeated :

" I was going to ask you when we was by ourselves —
Why were they all so — disagreeable ? "

In this book, as in the later romances. Miss Benson was
invaluable for the help she gave her brother in the looking
up of references and verifying of dates and other details.

The Kings Achievement was a far better title for this
book than what Hugh first meant to call it — The King's
Conscience. Henry VHI appears in it, noticeably, but once,
in a scene parallel, but inferior, to that in which Anthony
in By What Authority intercedes with Elizabeth. ^ More-
over, his coarse figure dominates the book far less than
does Elizabeth in the earlier romance, nor is his
psychology analysed with the subtlety Hugh was willing
to expend upon the Queen. His pathos is not indicated,
nor his artistic, pious, and passionate youth, nor that re-
ligious anxiety which was with him to the end. Cranmer,
too, is a far paler figure than is Grindal. and Ralph
than either Anthony, James, or even Hubert. Chris is
far less alive than Anthony. There is no Isabel, and after

^ There is a water progress, however, comparable to Elizabeth's procession
down Cheapside.

374 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

More and Fisher have been despatched, there is no one
left, among the outstanding actors, save Beatrice Atherton,
who is "pendant" to Mary Corbet, as everyone has
recognised. The mass of secondary actors are soundly
drawn, except, may I perhaps say, Lady Torridon, who
is neither quite modern nor certainly in the least Tudor.
This diffused and levelled interest may be more in harmony
with most experience of life, but makes the book to be
less romantic than Hugh's first historical novel.

Its real hero, or what gives it unity, is here no longer
England, but the monasteries. That Hugh recognised this
is witnessed by the change of its title, and by the criti-
cism which pursued the volume. Catholic critics were
often very indignant that he made his monks such craven
creatures, hysterical and bewildered, yielding quickly to
the brow-beating of the Visitors. On the other side, a
controversy in an important Review was begun, but not
continued, Benson considering that the manners of his
opponent, which, it must be confessed, were sufficiently
notorious, were such as precluded much discussion. Here,
Benson felt, was but a modern Man with a Muck-rake, not
seeking, however foolishly, for a pearl among the filth, but
raking for filth and more filth, and chucking it about the
world with his mean instrument. It may be as well to
remark that Benson was not shirking when he professed
his distaste for certain sorts of controversy. He satisfied
his conscience most scrupulously by referring each of
the disputed points to one or two authorities at Oxford
whose sanction he considered final ; and so little inclined
was he to suppose that all things Catholic were perfect
because Catholic, that he permitted himself to find a
certain Catholic ally to be, in method and language, " far
more objectionable — vulgar, abusive, and currish," than

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 375

his non-Catholic adversary. The important points are,
first, that Benson simply disregarded the attacks which
aimed at finding him out in minute errors ; what he asked
was that his general picture should be accurate. ^ Second,
it can be safely said that not even so did Benson even
approach an adequate statement of the misery, deserved
and undeserved, occasioned by the dissolution of the
monasteries. Of this anyone may be satisfied who has
had the least personal knowledge of events in France
from 1900 onwards. All but a handful of Englishmen
were, and, I imagine, always will be, in complete and com-
placent ignorance of the atrocities which were perpetrated
within a half-day's journey of their homes. Catholics
preach peace ; and presumably the history of the modern
expulsion never will be written. Benson knew little
enough of that shocking chapter of all but contemporary
history ; else he could have heightened his colours, and
without fear.

The story is certainly well built up of opposing per-
sonalities, and therefore full of the tragedy of twilit human
wills, active and in conflict and generating ill. There is
only one monster in the book — Henry VIII. One other
figure, briefly upon the scene, is devilish — the ex-priest
Layton, chief and obscenest looter of the monasteries, worse
than the traitor Lackington. Else, we have Sir James
and Lady Torridon, he loyal to creed, she an agnostic
before her proper time, with head empty of the larger
and holier ideals she never understood ; and their
daughters, Mary and Margaret, who have appeared in

^ It was on these lines that he vigorously attacked Kingsley's Westward Ho ■
in Everymati, and responded with some acerbity to an "answer" which concen-
trated on points of detail. He argued that Kingsley, in his superb and vital
romance, unconsciously but substantially falsified the whole picture of period and
individuals, under the spell of an anti-papal theory. CyVol. II., p. 224.

376 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

By What Authority as Catholics grown old in their fidelity.
Chris and Ralph are their two brothers, Chris manly
enough at first, and at last, but somewhat of a disiguilibre
while a monk ; Ralph, a worldling in search of advance-
ment, faithful to nothing save, at first, to his ambition,
and at the end, to his fallen master, Cromwell. The
brothers pursue devious ways of life, and Ralph will be
found expelling his own sister from her convent, and
his brother from his Lewes Priory, of which the demoli-
tion makes one of the really tragic moments of this book.

It is perhaps interesting to note that just as Benson
was writing the description of Chris bathing at night in
the lake of his home, Overfield, he wrote to Mr. Rolfe :

I like your 6.30 bathing inexpressibly ; possibly you know
the ID P.M. bathing too. But yours is far more whole-
some, and appears to me slightly sacramental, as no doubt
you make it.

And again from Tremans :

iWay 30,1905.

There is a new lake where I bathed night and morning
last year, and this year cannot at all, through reason of
two savage swans. It was superb last year by moonlight ;
I went down there a good many times with V. and F.,
who were here. But it was slightly devilish too, with
wreaths of mist coming off the water, and the stars and
moon, and dead silence.

It is really the Catholic Beatrice Atherton who is
responsible for the two dramatic " reversals of fortune "
occurring in this book. One is entertaining and pathetic,
but structurally unimportant — that of Lady Torridon, when
Beatrice, by delicious word-play, stings her out of her
contemptuous complacency first into amazement, then fury,
then distress, and finally conversion ; the other that of
Ralph himself, who, after a life spent, as I said, in self-

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 377

aggrandisement at the expense of every ideal, at the last
moment burns the paper which should have incriminated
Cromwell — a useless sacrifice, since Cromwell's head has
anyhow to fall, and Ralph to be racked and die.

His last words were " My — my Lord," and gave occa-
sion to one of Hugh Benson's quite characteristic con-
fessions. The boys of Riverview College, Sydney, have a
competition which involves their writing a letter to the
author whose books they have been studying for a certain
prize. I cannot resist quoting from three of them :

To Rev. R. H. Benson.

Rev. Sir, — One improvement might be made with
regard to the closing sentence of The Kings Achieve-
ment. You say the dying words of Ralph Torridon
were : " My Lord." Well, these words are a trifle ambiguous.
I presume they refer to Cromwell, and that they mean
Ralph, even at his death, was more faithful to Cromwell
than to God. Otherwise you would have "My God."
But couldn't you alter them a little, and make the meaning
plainer? — Yours, T. M. (II Grammar).

Dear Father Robert Benson, — I have just finished
your novel. The King s Achievement, and like it very much.
There are a very few things which, improved, would make
the novel better. About the character of Ralph Torridon :
on the whole it is very well put together, but I do not
think any person could so insult his brother, sister, and
father as he did. Now, at Ralph's death, I do not like
the way you end up. It left a funny impression on my
mind, for the novel makes out that he died very badly,
which, I think, is untrue to life. With these few remarks
I will close. — Yours, M. R. R. (II Grammar).

Dear Father Benson, — Lady Torridon is as mute as a
door-post, and yet you tell us that Ralph is like her. Well,
Ralph is all activity, and is never at home. Again, Lady
Torridon, I think, ought to start more quarrels at home,
and be more lively about it, if she is to be like Ralph, and
if she has such hatred for the monks. Dom Anthony is
a character which I don't think you have given us enough

378 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

of. He is a charming piece of soul and body, as one can
see by his action at Lewes, and then we don't see anything
of him and his bright ways when he has gone, and has
been banished. I'm sure he was not idle when he left
Lewes. — Yours very sincerely,

B. B. (Sub-senior).

Father Benson replied as follows :

Catholic Rectory, Cambridge,

April 13.

To the Editors of the Alma Mater.

Gentlemen, — I must thank you most sincerely for the
letters which you have admitted to your magazine with
reference to one or two of my books, for the kind criticisms
and suggestions contained in them, and for the gift of the
magazine in question.

Will you allow me to reply shortly to these letters ?

(i) Mr. T M. has hit upon the very point that was in
my own mind as I wrote the last words of The King's
Achievement. He says they are ambiguous ; I intended
that they should be. Dying persons who have lived more
than doubtful lives generally are ambiguous. I also in-
tended to suggest that in accordance with Miss Beatrice
Atherton's words, on a few pages before, it was possible,
considering all things, that loyalty to even such a villain
as Cromwell might be a virtue rather than a defect. It
is sometimes better to be faithful to a villain, in an in-
different matter, than to be faithful to nobody.

Finally, if I am asked whether I meant the words
'' My Lord " to refer to Cromwell or to Almighty God, I
can only answer that I am as doubtful as Mr. M. R. I
wish, however, it was untrue to life to make an evil liver
die evilly — though I don't say that Ralph did.

(2) Mr. M. R. objects to Ralph's villainy towards
his family. So do I, very much. But — well, it is better
to be an optimist than a pessimist. It is optimism that
converts the world. I will try to correct my pessimistic
tendencies.

(3) Mr. B. B. objects that Ralph and his mother, who
are said to be alike, are not really so. But people's atti-
tudes towards life, and their characters, can be very much
alike even though they express them quite differently. A
green butterfly is more really like a brown one, than a
brown one is like a dead leaf. Please consider this, Mr. B.

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 379

No, indeed, Dom Anthony was not idle when he left
Lewes ; but I simply hadn't time to go after him abroad.
He only succeeded with great difficulty in escaping him-
self. I didn't like to take the risk of going with him ; and,
as I say, there wasn't time. — Gentlemen, I am yours faith-
fully, Robert Hugh Benson.

P.S. — I trust all the other authors to whom you have
written will answer also. [The other authors were Scott,
Dickens, and Coleridge.]

Though the book has fewer set scenes, perhaps, fewer
episodes (the Pilgrimage of Grace is unnecessarily episodic,
just like "Northern Religion "in the earlier book), less rhetoric,
and more introspection of a slightly neurotic type (Chris
does not really master us, and Ralph's soul moves jerkily),
there is more even colour and progression in it which, had
Benson been destined ever to give himself due time for
his work, might have fulfilled its promise of real construc-
tive eminence. As it is, Anne Boleyn, laughing frantically
up to her death's eve in the very Tower room where she
had spent the eve of her coronation, is an unforgettable
vignette ; the scenes with More at Chelsea and with
Fisher, with Mary Torridon — in need, at first, of her con-
vent as pathetically as ever was Bazin's Isolie — make epi-
sodes of true drama.

Hugh spent Christmas at Tremans, for which he had
been preparing charades, " with a large collection of masks."
He there told his mother that he wanted to join, if possible,
at Magdalene, where about this time his brother was coming
to take up residence. Already in November he had
thought of establishing himself at any rate at Cambridge.

November 28.

I am beginning to think vaguely of coming here per-
manently. There is an immense amount to be done. But
it is only very vague.

38o ROBERT HUGH BENSON

To Miss E. Kemble Martin he repeated :

There is an immense amount to do, if one only has
sufficient tact, as all sorts of people are interested in the
Church, and wish to hear about it. There is no need to go
out of one's way to seek them, even if it were advisable,
which it is not.

The Magdalene plan was judged, however, indiscreet,
if not impracticable, at least for the present ; and he soon
offered himself to Mgr. Scott as possible curate at the
Catholic rectory. Financial considerations for the moment
put this plan too into abeyance.^

That he did not actually go to Magdalene did not,
however, stand in the way of much intercourse between
him and his elder brother. A new friendship was in-
augurated, unusual, surely, between brothers who have
reached middle-age without any such sense of close
comradeship having declared itself. These, also, it might
have been judged, had not recently been separated by a
spiritual schism, more profound than any which existed
in their younger years. However, this friendship did but
become the easier and more expansive as time went on,
and the slight sense of being — in the background, somehow
— at war, vanished. Others, in rather surprising numbers,
have noticed, in the later years, Hugh's increased gentle-
ness and power of making allowances without sacrifice of
principle.

From Rome Hugh had written to his mother, and in all
the singular circumstances I do not hesitate long to quote
these fragments :

I had a long letter from Arthur, so nice, this morning,

^ He was very pleased by an invitation to take a mission at Downside.
Trust was thus displayed in him, and that the request came from religious, and
these the Benedictines, pleased him yet more. But he had to refuse.

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 381

about a boy I wrote to him about who wants to get into
Eton next year. I Hke Arthur.

And now in 1905 he will say :

Arthur comes up to-day ; and I am dining with him
to-night. He is delightful.

And later on to a friend :

Yes, E. F. B. is a cheerful bird. And A. C. B. is a bird
of paradise. He now tells me that I may have a private
sitting-room and bedroom in his new house whenever I
care to come ; and SILENCE for nineteen hours out of
twenty-four. He has also, so to speak, made me a Fellow
of Magdalene, and tells me to dine there at his expense
whenever I want to, whether he is there or not. What a
heavenly man !

This was after Mr. A. C. Benson had taken, for a short
period, Hinton Hall, with its shooting of some eight hundred
acres in the Ely flats.

Of this, Hugh wrote on March 24, 1906 :

[Hinton Hall] really is quite heavenly, delightful
inside — and no human habitation in sight outside. It
struck me, morbidly perhaps, but also complimentarily,
that it would be an ideal place to be ill in. It would be
cheerful and interesting ; and one would know that all
the rest of the house was pleased and smiling too, and
that nobody would come and bother, or make a noise, or
ring the bell. I don't think one could pay a higher com-
pliment to any place, unless one said one would like to
have been brought up there as a child ; and that also I felt.

As yet, however, Mr. Benson had only the hospitality
of Magdalene to offer to his brother ; Hugh availed himself
freely of it, and often went there to dine, passing beneath the
old clock with its significant motto : Garde ta Foy. It was
with offered fancies such as these that his ingenious brain
loved to play. Mr. A. C. Benson on his side enjoyed

382 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

coming to Llandaff House, and besides this, he writes in
Hugh :

We arranged always to walk together on Sunday after-
noons. As an old member of King's College, I had a key
of the garden there, in the Backs, and a pass-key of the
college gates, which were locked on Sunday during the
chapel service. We always went and walked about that
beautiful garden with its winding paths, or sat out in
the bowling-green. Then we generally let ourselves into
the college grounds, and went up to the south porch of the
chapel, where we could hear the service proceeding within.
I can remember Hugh saying, as the Psalms came to an
end : " Anglican double chants, how comfortable and
delicious, and how entirely irreligious 1 "

" It fails one," he said, on another occasion, of
academical religion, " if one is ill." ^sthetically, this
worship of universities and cathedrals was very nearly
his ideal.

The morality play of Everyman was at this time revealing
to him new possibilities for a Catholic author. He went,
too, to Oxford for the Clouds, and made a really affec-
tionate acquaintance with Mr. F. F. Urquhart of Balliol.^
Mr. Urquhart introduced him later on to a small Catholic
debating club, now defunct, and suggested him for Mr.
Wilfrid Ward's Westminster Dining Society, to which he
was in fact elected. He read there a paper on Personality
on March 29, 1905, of which there is no need to give any
details. His views on this and allied subjects are dis-
cussed below. On April 5, he wrote to Mr. Urquhart :

April 5.

I should immensely like to go to Stonyhurst some day ;
but at present, I am afraid, I am as full up as I can be.

^ He found Mr. Urquhart "charming, and extraordinarily clever, and very
Oxfordy." By this he did not allude to what he called the Axfahd manner,
which was complicated by ecclesiasticism, and involved pats and pawings and
brotherly embraces which reduced his nerves to chaotic exasperation.

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 383

I read its history a few years ago with great pleasure.
Thank you for what you tell me about The Light In-
visible.^ It is good to hear of things like that. We had
a good dinner last week at the Dining Society ; Lord
Llandaff was a little caustic, as usual ; and Balfour " sat

soundly on Fr. P for saying that theologians talked a

different language to scientists. " That is my point," he
said ; " it is what I complain of." I was so much in-
terested to hear of Fr. Tyrrell. He was kind to me in
correspondence three years ago ; when I was " upset." . . .
And I hear a lot about him from various [people] ; and
read his books over and over again.

I always recommend him as an antidote to Mallock,
they are so very much alike in shrewdness and subtlety.

Having accomplished The King's Achievement, it was
on Queen Mary Tudor he now concentrated.

Llandaff House, Cambridge,
February 1 5 [1905].

Now I want to begin on Queen Mary. A great many
reviews have taunted me with having avoided that side,
and I want much to show that a case can be made. Mary
is one of the most pathetic figures in history, I think —
snubbed, misunderstood, soured by trouble, with a con-
science and convictions such as few have.

March 6 [1905].

I am on the verge of the Mary Book, exactly as on the
edge of a pond on a cold day — dawdling over trifles, and
meaning to plunge, and then thinking I must do some-
thing else first — it is an appalling undertaking.

Three distractions here occurred — he discovers a cold-
water cure : ^ the Bishop of Northampton accepts him for
his diocese ; and there is a University discussion on the
suppression of Greek at the entrance examination. After

1 This was, that it had interested and comforted the last days of a young
Jesuit who had recently died.

^ The late Mr. Reginald Balfour.

^ It was some dyspepsia of the sort here implied, I imagine, which made him
create a sensation by fainting in King's Combination Room after dinner on
Nov. 1 8, 1904.

384 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

it he exclaims : " I did not think there were so many
clergymen in the world ! . . ." In consequence he found
heart to resume his task.

November 13.

I have begun " Mary " with dreadful fear. If only I
can do it right, it will be by far the best thing I have done ;
but it is difficult beyond belief. I am telling half from my
hero's point of view, and half from Mary's — mixing them
up. My man's is easy enough ; but the Queen's is fearful !
I have to know every conceivable detail. I have already
found out that she ate quantities of meat for breakfast.

The book is therefore to be a psychological study rather
than a romance with an ordered plot, and will involve, in
the main, the Queen herself, and Master Guy Manton, a
gentleman of her court.

April 30.

Queen Mary is getting along. I have emended the
first part very much, along the kind of lines that you and
Maggie suggested, and have made Guy ever so much
more interesting. All his hardness has become intentional
instead of natural. He means to be hard now, because he
sees he cannot make way without it. The burning of
Latimer and Ridley is now his crisis, in which he deliber-
ately chokes down his pity ; he then becomes a devil in
consequence, and doesn't recover until the end of the
book, when his pity for Mary conquers him. How is that ?
Don't you think that an ingenious solution ?

He assured Miss E. K. Martin :

I am going to take immense pains — much more than
with By What Authority — in order to make people see
how unjustly they have treated her in the past. But that
is a proud and high ambition.

And later :

Queen Mary is going along nicely. I think she will
be good ; but for the last day or two I have stuck in a
furious brawl, and my people wait hour after hour with
uplifted weapons, and I can't let them put them down. At

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 385

this moment someone is pausing with clenched fists and a
savage expression.

It is odd how these things run — apparently independ-
ent of one's will and intellect.

This was often so with him. Later on, when he tried
to rewrite the Charles II book, he complained :

August 10, 1905.

I am dingily rewriting an old book. What weary work
that is ! . . . This is the fourth time of rewriting. . . .
Also I am doing about eleven thousand other things
simultaneously. . . . When I write for the first time my
characters do their own business and say their own words
entirely. Then I have to select them in rewriting, and
have an eye on the readers, and it is just exactly this that
I HATE. E.g. in my present book two people have a long
technical interview. Now they did have it, and they said
just those things. But the public would be bored by
listening ; I can't utter a word. So I have to refuse to
be in the room with them, and the result is that pages
of labour disappear, and we are left waiting outside with
a dull clergyman until they have done. Now, how heart-
breaking ! Because it is really very interesting indeed, and
all perfectly true.

By May 6 he made a disastrous discovery :

I am discovering the secret of economy of time, which
is always to do two things simultaneously. I read Queen
Mary and Hadrian VI I ^ while I eat, dress, undress, go
from room to room, and combine walking always with the
things I have got to do. It is simply delightful.

Many readers have found The Queen's Tragedy a diffi-
cult book to like. At a first reading, Benson, who could
do, no doubt, without plots, does seem to have, as it were,
just chucked down his psychological impressions in slabs,
sandwiched between page after page of pageantry. The
pageantry of the book is, one may confess, superb. There
are unforgettable scenes : the palaces, with Mary's pre-

^ Of Hadrian VII I shall say a word below, Vol. II, p. 94.
I 2 B

386 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

sence so strongly felt even when unseen ; the episode of
Philip's coming to Winchester ; the preparation of the
Cathedral on the night before the marriage ; the marriage
itself (seen, as Benson loves to have his great moments
viewed, imperfectly, from an angle, by a secondary per-
sonage often — in this instance by Jack Norris, the easy-
going gentleman-usher : later, Mary herself will view the
return of the Benedictines to Westminster from her private
place above King Edward's shrine) ; above all, the recon-
ciliation of England with the Holy See.

But the psychology itself, on which in this book we are
meant to concentrate, somehow fails to convince in all
save one all-important instance. To tell the truth, Benson
was applying a principle which later on he formulated in
the following short conversation :

" Why don't you take more trouble over your novels ? "
a friend once asked him. " If a thing's worth doing at all,
it's worth doing well."

" I totally disagree," he energetically exclaimed. " There
are lots of things which are worth doing, but aren't in the
least worth doing well."

He proceeded to explain that in his novels he wrote
only to make one point, to "help" one reader, or perhaps
one group of readers. If that point were but made, and
those readers touched, " tout le reste n'est que litt^rature,"
and might be allowed to slide. How far an artist could
permit himself thus to speak we may have an occasion of
asking later on. Suffice it here to say that he wanted in
this book, to which its title gives the key, to paint a spiritu-
ally convincing portrait of Queen Mary, and as for con-
struction, development, climax, and the like, at best all that
was secondary. He did not bother about it, despite his
determination to take such especially " great pains." Those

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 387

all were concentrated on the central figure. Magdalene
Dacre/ at first so charming, then so puzzlingly selfish and
ineffective ; Jane Dormer, just ordinarily sweet, then with
such hinted depths of spiritual intelligence ; Jack Norris,
jolly and all too easy-going, and talkative, too often, in his
cups ; Dick Kearsley, that seeming-sour, most honourable
and loyal friend — all these, who with care might have been
developed into real personages to live in literature, for
each of them we are beginning to love, and feel ourselves
defrauded as they vanish — are carelessly sketched in,
treasures tossed out by a millionaire, too rich to care,
adequately, for his own beautiful gift.^ In them too is
visible that element of noisiness in description, which is
his who wishes to make, quickly, a strong effect, without
the patience to accumulate the small touches which shall
at last produce it forcefully. These people in the " Mary
Book" are all the time "snapping," "snarling," "hissing,"
even " barking " :^ they bite their lips, and bare their teeth,
and they are always at it. Now, is not this hurry and
buffeting ; are we not pushed about — not imperceptibly led
forward, with infrequent shocks just to make us realise the
distance we have travelled or the goal we have reached ?
Here is, perhaps, an impressionist hurling down of colours
side by side which is not really craftsmanship, but violence
in place of strength, and audacity instead of courage.

But what about Guy Manton ? Assisted by the letter
quoted above I would argue that Hugh Benson changed
his mind about him in the middle of his tale. Guy was

^ Magdalene Dacre, it appears, was in reality married before Queen Mary's
death.

* As for the Reformers, Ridley and Latimer, we simply cannot tell what we
are supposed to think of them and of their martyrdom. Are they caricatures?
contemptible? pathetic? genuinely tragic? Perhaps Benson himself was torn
two ways in their regard. Perhaps he had just not made up his mind.

^ In T/ie Necromancers we shall have a Lady Laura who mews.

388 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

not at first meant to be a psychological study at all. How-
ever, he certainly became one, and that, a study in hardness.
Now, why did Hugh do this ? Nothing would be more
tiresome than to insist that in each of his chief characters
Hugh reproduced one side at least of himself. Yet I will
be bold to say that there is one passage which might very
well have been written about Hugh by an outside unsym-
pathetic observer just then at Cambridge :

[Guy] was a strange creature ; they could understand
neither his tenderness nor his spasms of rage. He had
made himself ridiculous more than once in his friendships
by showing a compassion for queer persons they could not
comprehend ; and he had made himself a little terrible, too,
half a dozen times in his furies against disloyalty, and his
contempt of what they considered academic finesse.

However, just at this time Hugh was going through
some quite singular experiences connected with friendship
and the duties of loyalty, and was likely to be, for some
time, increasingly misunderstood in this and other points.
That his character contained an element of hardness,
which he sometimes deplored, and at other times would
cultivate, but always recognised, few should really find it
hard to recognise along with him. And just now the
loneliness, and the necessity of hardening one's self to deal
with positive rebuff no less than negative neglect coming
from most widely diverse quarters, were prominent topics
in his consciousness. But it will be easier to observe them
separately, and later on in his life, than to try to study
him in the person of Guy Manton ; not only, I repeat, be-
cause the description of Manton is unequally sketched in,
is properly worked out neither at the outset of his harden-
ing, in its development and as it were crystallisation, and
least of all in its break-up and disintegration, but because

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 389

Hugh himself, in character, was so far from his full self-
realisation.

But Hugh had set to work to draw, primarily, a
picture of Queen Mary, and knew how difficult his task
was :

She is pious ; she is zealous ; she has a will of her
own ; she is cold ; she is hot ; she is miserly ; she is
liberal ; she has a sad soul and a merry dress ; she is
silent ; she can speak like an orator, for I heard her at the
Guildhall in February, and she set my heart afire ; then
she put it out again next day by her coldness.

Could Hugh Benson " make a woman out of that " ?
Well, somehow, he succeeded, I believe, despite the very
many Catholic critics who felt, no doubt, that the Catholic
Queen ought to have been pictured as more attractive.
And to begin with, observe this artist's honesty. If, indeed,
the portraits of the crimson-faced and swollen Henry, and
the haggard wanton, his daughter Elizabeth, were propa-
gandist caricatures (and in The Queen's Tragedy, Elizabeth
in her radiant, seductive youth is no less repulsive) why
could not Benson have made Queen Mary charming?
Quite simply he refused to tamper with what he thought
the truth — he gave rein to that rather terrible realism
which side by side with his mystical sense and creative
imagination was so fast developing in him. Mary in this
book is tragically impotent to charm, and half the time
shocks, offends, and alienates her court, her country, and,
as I said, so many moderns who were fain to love her.

Frankly, the title gives the book its key. The whole
motive is failure within ; from without, defeat. Mary dies
quite sure that her husband scorns her, having left no heir,
foreseeing Elizabeth's accession, and the collapse of her
one hope, the restoration in England of Catholicism. No

390 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

death of her own body could compare with the spiritual
ruin of one soul, even ; and she foresaw that of an entire
nation, and she felt that had she been other, all still might
have been well. She had acted always for the best, and
her action had brought ruin. There was her tragedy.

Her long increasing illness is described by Benson with
extraordinary imaginative insight. How, one asks, could
he possibly have known all that ? Down to the least detail
he is accurate — the hideous headache Mary's heavy doze
in the arm-chair would have caused ; the special horrors of
that giddiness which sheer weakness puts into the brain. . . .
Benson had not, it is true, been gravely ill himself ; but I
believe he must, already even, have felt ill, as nervous
natures can ; and he watched himself accurately, and multi-
plied his sensations, and surmised their analogies, and lit by
sheer experiment upon others.^ But upon the mysterious
method of Death's coming, how did he alight so strangely
well ? How, so early in his career, was he so at home in
those shadowy regions ? I think the whole of that last
chapter, in which " Mary the Queen decides her last
matters and takes her leave " emigrates entirely from the
ordinary realms of successful art into those of inspiration
and of awe. I do not feel as if Benson himself quite
realised how terribly and solemnly real a work he was
creating. One day, at the stroke of the luncheon bell,
he walked into the Llandaff House dining-room rubbing
his hands with glee and in perfectly radiant spirits.
" Queen Mary's d-d-dead," he exclaimed. " She has been
dying all the morning. Such a death-bed — really, it's too
moving — quite tremendous — but I am completely done up."
" I think," my informant adds, " that he said it was the

^ "Have you ever slapped your arm with a certain sort of primula?" he
disconcertingly inquires of Mr. Rolfe. " It produces eczema."

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 391

best description of her death-bed he had ever seen." Is not
that strange ? After writing pages of such power and
poignancy, it might well be wondered at that he should
have been able to eat or talk at all. The chapel, one might
have thought, would have summoned him, rather than the
dining-room.i

In these experiences of the dying, which he undoubtedly
perceives from within the sick woman's brain, he uses in a
masterly way the data of external fact for the construction
of her sense-hallucinations, and then, of her spiritual
aspirations. Is not that as it should be ? The priest in
his red-crossed sulphur-coloured vestment becomes the
misty figure with the enormous Sign of man's salvation at
its back, and the Sun held to its heart. . . . The liveries of
her servants, and the longed-for heir, give her the material
for those troops of green- and white-clad children whose
footsteps tinkle through her room, bringing with them all
sweet memories of dew and sunlit dawn and breeze.
Earlier in the book a true note was struck. " It is not,"
Jane Dormer said of the cold Queen, "that she has no
heart, but that it has been broken too often, and she fears
to show it now." And at the end, the exhausted woman
finds that death was better than mere ceasing of life's old
torment. " In te, Morte, si posa nostra ignuda natura,
lieta no, ma sicura dall' antico dolor." Mary saw the utter
failure of all her nature's effort ; but even as Hugh Benson,
braver than Leopardi, will one day cry out, " My whole
Gospel is : There is no such thing as failure," so she is
now longing to proclaim to all the world " how great and
sweet was death." Viaticum came to her :

She was conscious of her body again now, her wasted

^ He also wrote a small pamphlet for the Catholic Truth Society, comparing
Mary's death-bed with Elizabeth's.

392 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

limbs, her shrunken breast ; and through every fibre of it
stole a sweetness. It was to that hideous and distorted
thing that the sweet Body of her Lord had come ; it was
that piteous soul that had so toiled with troubles, and
striven with desire and fierce passion, perplexed, buffeted,
despised, that the stainless and tormented soul, the awful
Divinity of the God whom she had so ineffectually tried to
serve, had deigned to visit.

^^ Jesu ! Jesu ! " she whispered, " esto vcv^ijesu ! I have
failed, dear Jesus, but Thou hast not."

So not even her poor love-story really ended, at the
last, in tragedy.

And Hugh's mother wrote to him from Tremans :

I can't describe how it moves me, nor how in love with
death it seems to make one. . . . This last half-hour we
have followed her from within ; it all moves round now —
the strange spaces, the lawn, the sweet children, the
turning to deeds of duty that have to be done, the appear-
ance of faces and their disappearance, the utter helpless-
ness, the sweetness of pardon and peace — all events, even
to most of her Court having gone to Elizabeth — all in God's
hands — no bitterness. The great Rites, and the lifted and
interpenetrated soul — and the Coming of the Lord, the Sun
of righteousness — it is all too much to speak of ; it did
happeny«^^ so.

It appears to me that Richard Raynal, Solitary, which
he began early in 1905, was the direct expression of his
inward craving for solitude. This wais very strong at this
period ; I shall return to it explicitly in a later chapter.
He kept his mother and some friends closely acquainted
with the progress of the book, and on July 2, 1905, wrote to
one of these :

My hermit comes to me straight from heaven. I am
more certain that he exists than that I do.

He had written earlier to his mother that

the hermit moves me immensely ; but it is either very
good indeed, or very bad indeed ; and I am not quite

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 393

sure which. It is extremely mystical, and written in per-
fectly plain English, hammered with great care, rather like
The Hill of Trouble}- I find my handwriting becoming
pointed and fifteenth century. I long to read it aloud to
everybody.

June 30.

I have FINISHED the first draft of The Hermit and the
King. It is so moving that I don't know what to do ; and
has a dull cynical introduction and cynical footnotes as
a foil.

The book presented itself as a very free re-translation
of a French version of an English MS. belonging to the
end of the sixteenth century. This Vita et obitus Dni.
Ricardi Raynal Hereniitce was given as written by Sir John
Chadfield, the parish priest of the neighbourhood in which
Richard Raynal had his cell, and as edited by Fr. Benson,
with an elaborate introduction concerning the discovery of
the MS. in Rome, with footnotes, and, above all, pointed
excisions of Sir John's tedious disquisitions and moralising,
at which the editor is never tired of poking fun.

Concerning this book, too, he was bombarded with
questions as to whether it was fiction. People were furious
when they found the introduction and notes were an elabo-
rate " take in." Mrs. Craigie had certainly bewildered even
the most cautious readers by her footnotes to the School
for Saints and Robert Orange. Benson's device was but
sketchily worked out compared to the enormously compli-
cated machinery by which Mr. Montgomery Carmichael
led practically every single critic to account his Auto-
biography of fohn William Walshe (a book allied in a
hundred ways to Richard Raynal) to be true history. But
I doubt if I am mistaken in putting down as the immediate

1 By Mr. A. C. Benson. It Wcis Mr. Reginald Balfour who supplied him with
most, perhaps, of the facts he used in Richard Raynal. In collaboration, too,
with him and Yr. Sebastian Ritchie of the Birmingham Oratory, he joined in
composing the delightful Child's Alphabet of Saints.

394 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

occasion of his ingenious metiiod, Mr. Rolfe's " translation "
Don Tarquinio?-

It is — perhaps, though, because we do know that Richard
Raynal is pure fiction — difficult to see how it could have
been taken for a transcript. All manner of comments,
appreciations, facts of observation, terms of comparison,
even objects of sensation (as, for instance, colour, harped
upon in a way quite unknown to mediaeval sestheticism, I
think), belong utterly to the modern mentality. And these
are far too integral to the book to be due to any mere
translator's licence. Benson himself expected this to be
seen, and was restless under accusations. He wrote :

The Light Invisible, I should have thought, carried
" fiction " written all over it. Not one review, and I have
seen, I suppose, between fifty and a hundred, ever suggested
that it was anything else. But, really, if anyone will take
the trouble to read the title-page of Richard Raynal, I do
not think he could possibly fall into the mistake again. A
" translator " could not possibly write The History of Richard
Raynal, Solitary, BY Robert Hugh Benson.

The story is fragmentary, and portrays the life of a
young hermit from the time when the call of God came to
him, bidding him visit the King — Henry VI presumably, for
Benson affects that his MS. omits all names of places and
persons and all dates, a proceeding which certainly saves a
deal of trouble. The hermit goes to Westminster, announces
to the sick youth his approaching " passion," which super-
induces in the King an epileptic fit of a more or less
mysterious kind ; after the scourging, cajoling, and mani-
fold temptation of the hermit, and finally the murderous
attack upon him, a revulsion of feeling causes him to be

1 Don Tarquinio certainly was to serve as model for the original plan of St.
Thomas of Canterhiry. One rather pathetic case was that of a lady who, sick
of fiction, turned with relief to "real historical work like Richard Raynair
" But," she asked, "why did I'"r. Benson leave out parts of the MS. ?"

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 395

regarded as a saint, and to be set " with the rich in his
death," to be laid on the king's own bed, and there to die.

There are three dominant motifs in the book : first, the
life of inner solitude with God, that lofty form of prayer
which has carried a man beyond the level, even, where he
must resist nature ; for now nature is no more a separation
from God but a sacrament which brings Him near : second,
the passion and pain incidental to all achievement of voca-
tion : and third, the failure of the " world's coarse thumb
and finger " to plumb the nature of this life and joy, and
pain and death. The first of these he elaborated with the
help of Gorres and Richard Rolle of Hampden, finding
himself unable to add the infusion of Cornelius Agrippa>
to which Mr. Rolfe was constantly urging him. Certainly,
he captures a most fresh and fragrant atmosphere, a
Franciscan gaiety, and he is happy in the conspiration of
Nature with the Supernatural in the praise of God. Extreme
simplicity, perfect cleanness, much clear colour — yellows,
skiey blues, all the tender greens of vegetation — char-
acterise the life Raynal leads in his thatched hut in the
forest. Benson deliberately leaves all dark or gloomy
elements to one side at the first. This lovely life with God is
to be sheer happiness, in which all creation, life of beast
and bird and leaf, joins. Richard was a Parsifal, for whom
Good Friday did but make the world sweeter and more
" childlike pure " with flowers. Exidtavit spiritus mens.

The hermit is himself beautiful; in feature, even : God's
"darling," specialissimus. Into this resurrection of long-
lost innocence had the earlier " passions " of penance and
prayer elevated the young man ; a completed passion was
to perfect him into the likeness of the Crucified, and daring
analogies are set forth between these Sufferers, scourged
and flouted by the courts, and by men at arms, and by

396 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

the crowd, though certain biographers have before now far
outstripped Hugh Benson in a like method of comparing
St. Francis of Assisi with his Model.

Two strong contrasts are set beside the hermit : the
rather dull, pious old priest (in whom Benson was fond of
detecting himself, much to the annoyance of his wor-
shippers, who preferred to find him in Richard Raynal.
This idea never failed to provoke in him those gleeful
giggles to which from time to time he fell a helpless
victim) ; and the Ankret in his foul cell at Westminster,
an assault upon the refined sensations of certain more
fastidious among his readers, for which they have never
quite forgiven him. Yet the Ankret, too, had his place in
God's scheme of asceticism : this world, God might decree,
might have to be neglected or even spurned ; though just
about this time Benson was writing to a friend : " I do not
believe that lovely things have to be stamped upon. Should
they not rather be led in chains ? " But Richard Raynal
had his escort of whatsoever things are beautiful, without
even needing to enchain them. . . . However, a definite
link may be noticed between Benson and Raynal's King.
This it is impossible to explain, because the essence
of it is in a certain negativeness, an inhibition of thought
and judgment, a bewilderment in face of life, of the future,
of duty, above all, of the Unknown. It was a kind of
spiritual paralysis of which no account was to be given;
in which you could only wait, dazed, somehow, by the
unmanageable mystery of immediate life. It is hard to
describe anything so essentially blank, and featureless,
and numbing. Nor can I do other than dogmatically
assert that Hugh, at his hours, experienced this, and
strongly. Into the King, then, he put not a little of
himself. Yet Raynal was indeed that emancipated self

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 397

Hugh prayed to be, and was not, though in the visioned
possibility he found consolation. " All that I hoped to be,
and was not, comforts me." " All I could never be : All,
men ignored in me, this was I worth to God. . . ." So,
after all, in a real sense Benson was Raynal too.

He loved this book, and to the end thought it the most
artistic of his works. Perhaps in this he is right. With
every part of it he found himself in sympathy. Even the
red-faced Cardinal (do you notice how Benson hates
" crimson-faced " men ? The distaste keeps showing itself,
in almost every book, of the historical sort at least) cannot
go wholly unabsolved by him. But here, as ever, true to
a strange quality in his artistic method, he throws a veil
of doubt on the whole affair. As sub-title, summing up
the book, he quotes from Seneca the saying that no great
talent — not even, does he hint ? — that of finding God in
mystic prayer, has existed without an admixture of
insanity.^

The Mirror of Shalott, which was being put into its
final shape at Llandaff House, consisted of the ghost stories
which he began in Rome, but were not published in book
form till 1907. They appeared first in Catholic periodicals,
and are said to have created, at first, the impression of
being little more than "pot-boilers." They are, it will
be remembered, stories put into the mouths of a group
of priests assembled in what Benson names the Canadian
Church of San Filippo in Rome. This is, of course, a
kind of glorified San Silvestro, and the priests are of
that predominantly unattractive type which perhaps
reflects Hugh's rather aloof interior attitude, noticeable

1 I do not know where Benson was at this time getting himself supplied with
apt quotations from the classics. Every chapter in The Queen's Tragedy is prefaced
by one. He certainly did not discover them himself, nor did he invent them.
Nor was it Mr. A. C. Benson who provided them.

398 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

at this time, towards his fellow clergy, and which after-
wards was so happily modified. He had, however, hoped,
at first, to publish the stories he had finished together
with some by his sister and others by a friend. The
publishers to whom they were offered pointed out their
lack of unity, and wanted Miss Benson to make them
all Egyptian in setting, for in two of her tales she
had used an Egyptian background with great success.
She refused to do this, and pointed out that a unity
was observable in them, owing to the gradual crescendo
of the mystical note, while the contrasts of scene added
necessary variety. While she deprecated her brother's
discursiveness, she willingly accepted, from his stories,
three, which she entitled The Haunt of Death (this is
Mr. Percival's story in the Mirror, about that iron mine
for which an exploration party in Wales had furnished
Hugh with all the staging) ; The House without a Soul{'' Mr.
Benson's " very weird story) ; and a chapter entitled
The Music of the Other World. Nuretnberg; of which I
can find no trace and no explanation. The idea of the
whole book was, to picture forth "the world within the
world," or, if you will, "the soul within the world."
Collaboration between Hugh Benson and anyone else
was, I believe, an impossibility, and the plan fell through.
The ideal survived, however. In ghost stories, he argued,
the "real thing" expresses itself as far as possible in a
certain medium. They are the translation of the super-
natural into the natural, and therefore only analogical
to any true statement, even, of fact. Spiritual events
undoubtedly (any Christian will admit) occur : how they
occur, not we with our brains dependent upon matter
for their imagery can define ; whether individual portents
have occurred — well, you must decide for yourself upon

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 399

the evidence. So the book begins, and so it ends. Mean-
while the stories move successfully upon the whole, and
had no need of the author's continual reminder that
they are very gruesome. Fr. Meuron " flashes his eyes
dreadfully round the circle " and " dashes forward " in his
emotion : pipes drop, cigarettes go out ; " nerves thrill
like a struck harp." We do not like being told when
to jump.'

There are but few personal reminiscences in this
work. Cornwall and Wales give him background
and something of their spiritually surcharged atmos-
phere. This may be significant : those districts are
different enough, in psychic value, from opulent though
fairy-haunted Sussex. In Fr. Maddox's story, too, there
is a reflection, unless I am mistaken, of Lord Halifax's
house, Garrowby, and very much more than a reflection
of how Benson wrote his novels and almost saw the ghosts
he longed quite to encounter. Later, in a chapter on his
psychic experiences, or lack of them, and in that which
deals with his Mysticism, I may venture to speak of his
whole attitude towards the preternatural manifesting itself
at different levels, such as (at lowest) clicks in furniture,
mysterious steps, " sensed " presences ; or (a little higher)
unwonted thought - transference or self - hypnotism ; or
again, ecstasy, and the quieting of a soul for prayer, when
the spiritual forces, evil equally with good, find so easy an
access to its habitually sealed recesses. And here must
enter the phenomena of madness and " possession "
(which Benson believed so much supposed lunacy to be),
and above all that summing up of the " Otherness," which
the soul in moments of extreme inward silence diagnoses,
into a Person, a Watcher, ready to invade if he be but
given the opportunity. As well as ever in The Necromancers,

400 ROBERT HUGH BENSON

Benson here can create for us that horrible sense of silence
round about us, in which dreadful forces are alert and
watching us. All ages have felt this in their way : the
Greeks especially, for whom the loveliness of the summer's
noon-day sleep trembled easily towards the terrible ; that
was the moment when they " saw nymphs," and the Panic
fear stirred their hair and blood. . . . And more, almost
than in the later book, Benson here insists on the torruption
of ordinary things — sometimes sheer bread and meat,
sometimes of a whole art, like painting — by some in-
dwelling spirit of evil.

Hugh Benson did not any more " play at ghosts " as
he used in his undergraduate days, in the Fellows' garden
of King's, pouncing on the runaway, and half killed with
the delicious terror of himself being pounced upon ; but
he retailed thes.e stories to the newer generation, round the
fire, and, Mr. Shane Leslie tells us, his success was huge.

And — how strangely, it will seem to many — this man
who mused upon tragic Queens a-dying, and philosophised
upon the nature of the soul, and saw the whole world
saturated with gigantic forces, good and evil, fighting for
the destiny of humanity, was still boy enough to write with
glee to a distant friend that he has resumed his ancient
practice of making caches, and is hiding all sorts of trivial-
ities, with inscriptions, in secret crannies of Cambridge
and of Ely buildings. I suppose that at this moment
fives-balls and buttons and halfpence, muffled in mottoes,
are awaiting discovery in those walls, for the mystification
of generations yet to be.

There is nothing left, I think, to be told about this
three terms' sojourn at Llandaff House. Father Benson
had not been idle during it ; in fact, his literary output
had been enormous. But he never had guessed that that

AT LLANDAFF HOUSE 401

was to have been the chief occupation of his first year of
priesthood. He wanted to act directly upon souls, and to
administer those sacraments over which he knew himself
to possess power. Moreover, unfamiliarity, too, may breed
contempt, or at least, suspicion : very emphatically it must
be said that this year of rather inevitable isolation accentu-
ated, by a drop of bitterness, that dislike for his fellow
clergy which, at first, was rather just a supercilious aloof-
ness due to his fastidious bringing up and mercurial tem-
perament. To this is due quite an appreciable part of
the harshness with which, in his books, he draws them.
In the next years of full sacerdotal life, this (for his soul
was just and generous) will be put right ; and it is here,
in my opinion, that the true division in his life must be
placed. Even Llandaff House was for him a period of
preparation. The full and public life began at Cambridge
Rectory.

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